Exhibitions

Jean-Charles Gil offers us an original artistic experience: a mise en abyme of dance slippers that brims with imagination and experience, a story whose Ariadne’s thread is the dancer’s agony and joy.

A long road from shadow to light; a series of thirteen compositions somewhere between installation and sculpture, capturing dance slippers on painter’s canvases.

Real slippers that are worn out, tattered, new, old.

Slippers for adults, children, men and women, in a palette of colors echoing the emotions and episodes in the dancer’s life.

Slippers that have been transfigured to tell us about the dancer’s journey between grisaille and dazzlement.

As the works unfold, there is an interweaving of sidesteps with undone ribbons, tied ribbons, anxiety, despair, suffering and enthusiasm, until the curtain falls and the artist finds abrupt solitude before himself, red slippers, black slippers.

And yet, an inextinguishable breath of life propels him towards new creations radiating energy and inner peace, blue slippers, white slippers.

A work immersed in an astonishing alchemy of order and disorder, of movement and immobility, endlessly decomposing and recomposing tableaux at once similar and dissimilar that are seen through the prism of a surprising kaleidoscope, with, as a final bouquet, a mandala of dance slippers, irradiant and secret.

An itinerary-exhibition of the classical dancer in his perpetual quest for the absolute, torn and transcended between the terrestrial, where his shoes anchor him, and the cosmic, towards which he strives, between the endless toil of Sisyphus and the ecstatic trance of the whirling dervish.

An ode to dance?

More like a chanson de geste in slippers, dedicated to a life of dance.

MARIE-JOËLLE BONNEFOY-LEFEUVRE
Art historian