Exposition - Thierry Carrier « ... On the other side »

Partnership: H Gallery - Paris “On the Other Side” might finally reveal what lies behind the door or behind that wall—a world we might catch a glimpse of through the keyhole or that crack worn away by time.
We undoubtedly want to see but not to know. These paintings are fragments of a body of work I’m trying to build into a cohesive whole. To show without imposing a narrative or intelligible meaning. On the other side lies what we imagine, what we fantasize about.

At first glance, if we were to cling to a narrative, we might evoke the relationship between the individual and a given environment. Here, a child soldier in a setting reminiscent of a possible America of the past; there, a woman lying by the water’s edge, venerable and at the mercy of any unforeseen event; here again, a young girl in the middle of a road. These images have meaning only if we choose to give them one. We don’t like ambiguity; we don’t like doubt; we don’t like confusion; and we feel this constant need for a point of reference or a framework that reassures us.
So what purpose can a figurative painting serve if it has no title or if we cannot precisely define what is happening before our eyes? We hover between what is possible in relation to reality and a still frame from a film without a script. We cannot even define the figure through an action… because there is no action. We cannot narrate events, and we find ourselves faced with the depiction of a state of being.

The paintings presented here, to me, are no more significant than simple pebbles picked up on a beach. What matters most are not these pebbles but the beach itself. A beach where I can stand and scan the horizon—an unreachable horizon where perhaps a boundary takes shape, a wall rises (a reference to the film *The Truman Show*)—where I might find an eroded crack and thus glimpse what the painting would finally allow me to see.
So all we have left are our own cultural references to provide meaning, or even a moral. We must draw from within ourselves what defines us and thus gain access, without too much difficulty, to a sensitive interpretation of the work.