The Visitors

April 26th - June 7th.

Religious iconography is a frequent source of inspiration for Pierre et Gilles. The lives of saints or sinners, recurrent depictions of the Virgin Mary, and the representation of Paradise, are among their favourite themes, allowing them to idealise – even sanctify – their models, suffusing them with a kind of holy aura. Stars and anonymous friends alike are transformed into icons, or allegories of Divine Grace, Good or Evil.

For La Force de l’Art 02, the two artists have chosen to intervene – for the first time in their career – in the context of a real place of worship. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the church of Saint Eustache will house a chapel completely designed and created by Pierre et Gilles, containing an exceptional photographic portrait of a modern Virgin Mary.

In a striking departure from their usual approach, involving the creation of a unique, ephemeral theatrical “set” destined solely for the finished photographic image of the model, Pierre et Gilles have decided – again for the first time – to break out of the frame and install an ephemeral environment within the real space of the church. The young French actress Hafsia Herzi is photographed as a Virgin and Child, surrounded by the wreckage of cars, and wearing a dazzling bridal gown by Christian Lacroix. This portrait – a Madonna of Paris’s satellite social housing projects – stands like a luminous harbinger of peace, an apparition in the middle of a chapel transformed into a building site, with scaffolding, safety lamps, ladders and marker cones.

www.saint-eustache.org

Pierre and Gilles

Pierre and Gilles have been making unique composed portraits for three decades. Pop stars, celebrities from the world of performance and fashion, friends of the duo or anonymous people, pose in fanciful roles that the two artists dream up, transvestites as saints, mythological figures, hoodlums, sailors or shipwreck survivors. Before being photographed each model is staged in sophisticated costumes and decor entirely designed by Pierre and Gilles.

The idealization of the model, the choice of loud and highly artificial colours, the over-decoration and above all the final retouching of the image carried out with touches of paints and glazes, gives these surprising photographic paintings great originality. [V. Th.]

Pierre was born in Roche-sur-Yon in 1950 and Gilles in Le Havre in 1953.
They live and work in Le Pré Saint-Gervais.