Biography
For over thirty years, Philip Gillet has been developing a unique body of work where spontaneity of gesture and mastery of traditional oil painting techniques meet.
Trained as an architect, with degrees from Paris and Venice, he explores the notions of time, depth, and movement in his practice. His paintings combine the immediacy of the line with creative processes that sometimes extend over several months.
Based in the Paris region, he is currently pursuing a demanding pictorial research, between constructive rigor and freedom of gesture.
Approach
His painting stems from a deliberate and experimental approach: progressively constructing a language from the physical experience of the body and the phenomena that accompany its movement.
At the heart of this work lies gesture in its most fundamental form. The body, subject to gravity, finds support, seeks its balance, moves, and inscribes its movement in space and time. The body's equilibrium, with or against the force of gravity, thus constitutes a generative principle of the line.
This initial physical experience leads to a deeper question: that of the relationship between the body, action, and our way of understanding and representing the world. Pictorial language is constructed from this experience of a body situated in space, subject to forces, and capable of action.
Painting thus becomes the site of a sensory experiment that, in some respects, could be compared to a physics experiment. It is not a matter of representing movement but of experiencing its conditions: body weight, support, balance and imbalance, speed, amplitude, direction, repetition, duration. The gesture unfolds in space under the influence of these constraints, and the surface retains its trace.
From gesture to language
This deliberate economy of means constitutes the starting point of a language that is built up over time.
The linear gesture is repeated, displaced, interrupted, superimposed. With each new intervention, the previous traces remain and become the conditions for the next. Time is therefore not only that of execution: it accumulates within the painting.
The transparency of oil paint and the use of resins make this temporality perceptible. Lines, flat areas, and layers of color overlap without necessarily erasing. Depths appear. Some marks seem close to the surface, others recede. Light passes through the successive layers and alters their perception.
The initial physical experience of the gesture thus gradually generates a pictorial space.
The creation of a work of art can extend over several sessions and sometimes several months. Each session constitutes a new experience, linked to the previous ones but never exactly reproducible. The eye accompanies the gesture, then intervenes between sessions: it observes, memorizes, selects, and guides possible developments.
The approach is built on this ongoing relationship between physical engagement and observation, between what is intentionally sought and what emerges during the experience.
From Repetition to Complexity
Starting from deliberately simple principles — a body, a gesture, a surface, a duration — painting gradually evolves towards complex organizations.
Repetition never produces exactly the same event. Each gesture occurs within a situation already transformed by the gestures that preceded it. Superimpositions, transparencies, intersections, and differences in density multiply the possible relationships.
Complexity is therefore not sought as a formal effect. It emerges from the accumulation and interaction of simple elements.
This logic, present from the very act of painting, finds a new development when the composition itself proceeds by assemblage.
Planks or panels are painted separately, either during the same session or sometimes several months apart. In a second stage, distinct from the act of painting, they are moved, brought together, compared and recomposed.
The gaze then takes over from the gesture.
Two painted panels, each with its own history and organization, can be brought together. Sometimes they remain perceptible as autonomous fragments participating in a larger composition. In other cases, their convergence is such that their visual boundaries tend to disappear: the lines, colors, and depths seem to extend from one panel to the other, revealing a new organization.
It is at this stage that the process can evoke certain logics of life and genetics: elements, each possessing their own identity, come into combination and give rise to a new reality that was not entirely found in any of them.
Assembling, therefore, is not simply a matter of adding fragments together. It becomes a process of transformation and emergence.
From assembly to composition
Once the assembly is balanced, it can be fixed in a steel frame. The blackened patina of the frame visually extends the charcoal lines incorporated into the layers of resin and paint.
The frame, however, introduces an additional tension. It gives this surface, made of shifting transparencies and depths, a physical boundary and the status of an object. It seems to momentarily halt a process that, by its very nature, could continue to evolve.
However, this limit is not definitive.
Several works can in turn be juxtaposed or separated. The verticals of the frames then blend with the painted lines; the intervals between the works become active. Continuities and discontinuities construct new rhythms and new relationships.
Since 2023, this research has developed in particular through ensembles made up of 40 x 40 cm square panels, painted in large numbers in a range of colors from dark and nocturnal atmospheres to very vibrant hues. These elements are no longer individually framed. Freed from this constraint, they can be combined into variable compositions, move in relation to one another, extend in different directions, or regain their autonomy.
The disappearance of the frame thus opens up a freer development of the assembly. The latter is no longer necessarily fixed in a definitive form: it can evolve, recompose itself and unfold according to the space in which it takes place.
From composition to space
These various compositional processes can then incorporate the characteristics of the space in which they take place: wall dimensions, angles, openings, distances, circulation patterns. Architecture is no longer merely the support for presenting the artwork; it becomes part of the compositional process itself.
The viewer himself experiences this through his movement. Depending on his position and the distance from which he looks, he successively perceives the material, the traces of the gesture, the fragments, their relationships, then the whole and the space that it transforms.
Thus, a research begun on the scale of the body and gesture gradually unfolds towards a broader inquiry into the construction of painting and its relationship to space.
From the body subjected to gravity to the gesture, from the gesture to the trace, from the trace to the superposition, from the superposition to the assembly, and from the assembly to space, the work develops as a continuous process of experimentation.
Painting is not considered here as the illustration of a pre-existing idea, but as a means of knowledge: a physical and sensory experience from which, over time, a language is built and a way of understanding the world is developed.