"Thibault Barrère is a contemporary neo-academic, neo-Baroque, neo-19th-century painter, proposing allegorical images in a sociocultural context still tied to the multifaceted deployment of modernity."
THE PAST AND ITS PRESENTS. PAINTINGS BY THIBAULT BARRÈRE
The pictorial production of Thibault Barrère coincides with the global trend that shapes his contemporary status, based on the recovery of a visual concept that combines elements from artistic periods that developed between the 17th and 19th centuries. Barrère's works integrate theoretical concepts, aesthetic aspects, and technical practices, drawing on the creative legacy produced from the founding of the enlightened European academies of the Ancien Régime and in the academic institutions that followed in the liberal wake of Romanticism. In this sense, Thibault Barrère is a contemporary neo-academic, neo-Baroque, neo-19th-century painter, proposing allegorical images in a sociocultural context still tied to the multifaceted deployment of modernity.
Barrère's imagery can be interpreted in two ways: as a symbolic meditation on the existential boundary themes (life, death, nature, thought, destiny, freedom, beauty, madness, emotions, loneliness, redemption), and as a circular reflection on the essence of painting through the iconography of painting itself. In Barrère's singular vision, one notices, on the one hand, a mythical-philosophical reflection, with ironic moments, that questions human arrogance and excess. On the other hand, there is the flow of a melancholic meditation. Considered during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as a pathology of the human soul, melancholy would later be described and practiced as the exquisite art of enlightened subjectivity. In the concept, theme, and craftsmanship of Thibault Barrère's pictorial art, the energy of memento mori (remember that you will die) powerfully vibrates.
-Erik Castillo