Gijs Milius at Bastide Projects

Artist: Gijs Milius

Exhibition title: Le long des raduses

Venue: Bastide Projects, Marseille, France

Date: May 5 – June 23, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Bastide Projects, Marseille

THE REAL.
A reflection on Gijs Milius’s exhibition “Le long des raduses”
By neither.

A long desert red area and a dark horizon.
On the forefront, the corner of a balcony or at leat a grey maybe concrete architecture.
A small grey rectangle triangle assumes its role of a floor and two walls erect to protect a potential character from the risks of falling down.
And rain drops.
One can count 14 of them but it’s not important.
What is happening in this drawing.
Nothing.
But still those droplets.
And if you may, if you want you look at them a bit longer.
Something is there, in the heart of all that nothing, produced by that nothing.
The drops are in between the surface of the painting / drawing and the space that is represented.
Some are resting on the surface of the canvas while others lie on the ledge of the concrete building, forcing the eye to navigate between two alternate realities : that of the gallery space and that of the fiction Mister Milius offers us.
It’s not a trick, it’s a storytale.

“In philosophy, the Real is that which is the authentic, unchangeable truth. It may be considered a primordial, external dimension of experience, referred to as the infinite, absolute or noumenal, as opposed to a reality contingent on sense perception and the material order. The Real is often considered irreducible to the symbolic order of lived experience, but may be gestured to in certain cases, such as the experience of the sublime.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Real

Gijs Milius draws from moments that have yet to happen.
Characters that exist already but on the side of your streets you forget to look upon.
Outside of the frame.
There’s an underlying and strong cinematic sense to his work.

From the first films in history, cinema has become the art of time through its capacity of capturing movement and therefore the illusion of time.
The “Lumières” already experienced that in their first films.

In 1896, in “ Démolition d’un mur “, they film four men working on breaking a wall and making it fall on the floor. The men start breaking it apart and all of a sudden their movements stop and then go backwards. And all a of a sudden, the wall itself rises from the floor to take back its original place, standing strong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI_Rxa0YFWg

Gijs’s work sets itself in the frame where the lumières decided to turn time back around. That one single frame accepting and showing a real and profound sense of time. It can be a moment in which weather is just about to change, a moment where a character is surprised by the spectators or just any moment waiting to happen and withholds in it an endless number of stories that take place in between the drawing and the space of the gallery.

«Equation wise, the first thing to do is to consider time as officially ended We’ll work on the other side of time” Madvillain – Shadows of tomorrow

The works can’t be “framed” per say, since what takes place in them is of the “hors-champ”.
Milius attempts to bring us to another side of the frame and with it an other side of time.
Leaving us to accept that nothing is to be known or understood but just to be lived.
And that is quite reassuring, to us at least.