Gérard Collin-Thiébaut

Born 1946. Lives and works in Besançon and Vuillafans, France. Since 1990, has been working on a total artwork, La Maison d’un artiste, a nod to the Brothers Goncourt, and a property in which he lives from time to time. This place of permanent display is an old Capuchin priory, surrounded by high walls and set in an English-style park, designed by the landscapers Brice-Michel Père et Fils in 1870. Gustave Courbet visited during his stays in Ornans .

The proximity of Switzerland prompts me to make a not unpretentious comparison between my practice and watches with complications that are the preserve of a discerning public. Developing the comparison, and honing the idea, I would tend to plump for the brand IWC, which, in around 1985, when it relaunched the Da Vinci1 , was trying to develop simpler complications. It was also in around 1985 that I put in place, once and for all, a body of work with complications, bringing together all the questions of art, with a method simultaneously involving different visual fields, easy to live with, the measures of which are my Dispositifs audiovisuels, my Oisivetés, my Copies and Transcriptions, my Distributeurs and Carnets d’Images, my Artistes en petits soldats, my Peintures sur le motifs and Rébus, L’Album encyclopédique monumental des arts, my urban pieces, etc., etc.2, the latter serving as a kind of chronograph and perpetual calendar. Taking the comparison further, when in 1990 LMH presented its Grande Complication3, on my side, getting bored with my everyday production of works (the common activity of any artist), I decided to make work from the works of other artists by becoming a curator, or a “Generator-Arbiter,” as Marcel Duchamp would say. In 1996, I affirmed that a listing of my works, in the form of multiple classifications, was enough to make an Œuvre, and started a catalogue of my works, without any visuals4, accompanied by a synoptic table, enabling me to measure intermediary time, like the tenth hand on the Da Vinci Rattrapante in 1995, a real bijou of ingenuity.

Although flexible, polished and silky, my artistic work always seems complex and is not easy to get hold of, being wary of easy effects, of immediate access and spontaneous understanding. But like the Da Vinci chronographe, made of super-hard ceramic and titanium, which was ahead of its time, this work needs to be very strong, not forgetting that it is there to give the indications needed for its times.
Gérard Collin-Thiébaut.

Gérard Collin-Thiébaut’s attitude is simple if radical. His purpose is to overturn convention and give the tree of the art world a good shaking, "when habits become form". Often elegant and deliberately traditional, even old-fashioned in appearance, his interventions suggest that things are easy, but go on to demonstrate that modernity is never what you see on the surface. […] Throughout his artistic career, he has worked to pursue the various categories of the fine arts using procedures of the day, bringing out correspondences, in order to achieve transversal knowledge and not only to allow a rereading of the world, but also to affirm that thought is a matter, not of found forms, but of forms that transform Not insignificant clues: Paul Otlet, Aby Warburg, Roussel, Duchamp, Flaubert, folk art.

Jean-Philippe Branche