Christophe Gilbert
In one of Christophe Gilbert’s photo-surrealist pieces, three nude babies with heart-shaped butts, are lying in a row, backs to the sun, waiting for their turn to suckle their mother’s breast. Their mother is more victim than muse. Her anatomically flawless body is flailed across the ground, in a way that looks like it had been beaten up and thrown down after a hard day’s night of sadomasochism. She is asleep, but not peacefully. Most likely, when her loving triplets had woken her up in the middle of the night to be breast-fed, she was in such a hideous state that she simply rolled over to them and whispered, ‘Just have your way with me’. Her breast milk is probably laced with heroin.
The worst part about Christophe Gilbert’s work is that it forces you to map out these gloomy conclusions in your head, and then you feel like they are all your fault. You want to turn away, vomit up a grilled cheese sandwich, but instead, you tell yourself its okay if you look just once last time.
And it is okay! I assure you that everyone is just as reluctantly intrigued as you. Christophe Gilbert should probably be arrested but I hope that if he is, he will continue making pieces that leave us shaking our heads in utter horror.
Tagged: Christophe Gilbert, photo-surrealism, Skin artwork
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Melanie O'Donovan said | 3 July, 2009
I agree the photo is like a car crash that you can’t stop looking at but Christophe Gilbert is fooling noone but putting a slender, tall, stretchmarkless, flat stomached model in the photo expecting the viewer to believe she has just given birth to triplets. Pulease!