david gil (born March 20th 1978) is a French- Colombian pluridisciplinary artist. His art questions the vanishing intersection between artistic mediums of expression and displays a preoccupation with our perception of reality : “who are we? what is out place in the now? Is now real? Is real real? These questions have influenced and shaped my body of work.” His captivating aesthetics have been described as daring, challenging and disturbing.
His artistic training and education, which spans across the globe, began with architecture. Designing, drawing and constructing scale models for the living lead him to enveloping the body, to sculpture, live performance, painting and eventually to film. “My medium of expression is the spectator’s mind”.
During the XXth Festival of Hyères in 2005, his violent elegance and shock tactics caused extremely divergent views with an explosive haute couture collection, short art-film and fashion show performance in which a model wearing hidden special effects suddenly blew up in the middle of the runway like a kamikaze in the streets of London. “I am fascinated by the know-how behind the process of draping the identity of a time in history.” david received two awards with the unanimous recognition of both the public and professionals.
One year later, he was given Carte Blanche by French Ministry of Culture and Communication for What is Real?, three-dimensional photo-reportage installation in the windows of the Palais Royal in Paris. Followed by multiple collaborations with international artists coming from different backgrounds and exhibitions in art institutions in France, England and the United States.
During Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture david proposed the Social Condom (2006) latex sculpture meant as method of prevention against the infection provoked by the virus of egoism. Portrait of my Time (2007), performed during Art Basel Miami Beach in the Wynwood Art District, questions the second amendment to the United States Constitution by staging André Breton’s simplest surrealist act “consisting in going into the street with revolvers in your fist and shooting blindly into the crowd as much as possible.”
Color Theory (2011), series of performing paintings serve as color bars to recalibrate the accuracy of the reality screened by NTSC monitors and question the most televised catastrophes in history taking place in a society showing symptoms of clinical substance abuse to television. Unwanted (2012) targets what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights refers to as “the right to live” and the decriminalization of abortion. His version of Hansel and Gretel (2008) stages food distribution in the world where starvation and obesity are contemporary neighbors. “The goal of my art is to confront the spectator to a reality which coexists with ours but that we prefer not to see.”
As soon as 2003, david began collaborations with corporate creative incubators such as 15 rue de la Paix for British luxury brand Alfred Dunhill, ... a moment in ... for Antwerp’s underground bvba 32 owner of Ann Demeulemeester and Haider Ackerman and most recently, also with a Carte Blanche by LVMH - Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s leading luxury group, to write and direct an animated short art-film portraying the values of Sephora to be released in 2013.
Today, david is currently working on his first feature art-film staging the collapse of the American dream using French psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan’s definition of Foreclosure; and he is also engaged on a series of choreographic workshops in collaboration with individuals affected by Huntington’s Chorea, neurodegenerative disorder affecting the movements of body.
