Random knowledge

Pierre et Gilles, Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard, are gay French artistic and romantic partners. They produce highly stylized photographs, building their own sets and costumes as well as retouching the photographs.

Pierre Commoy, the photographer, was born in 1949 in La Roche-sur-Yon. Gilles Blanchard, the painter, was born in 1953 in Le Havre. After art studies, they moved to Paris in 1973 where they met in 1976, and began to work together.

People photographed by Pierre et Gilles include: musicians Lio, Khaled, Étienne Daho, Marie France, Mikado, Marc Almond, Madonna, Kylie Minogue, Erasure, Deee-Lite, The Creatures, Nina Hagen and CocoRosie (the cover of their 2007 album The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn); actress Catherine Deneuve, actor Layke Anderson and designer Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Pierre and Gilles create their own kind of the staged portrait, turning a photograph into a mythological picture. In their works they present famous and unknown models as antique heroes, Christian saints and characters of genre scenes, as was customary in classical academic art. Pierre and Gilles found a convincing method of combining glamour and classics.

They create portraits of stars and unknowns in unique hand-painted photographs, through an established process:

• they first draw a sketch of the work they have imagined together, according to the model and the role they want him to play;
• they conceive the entire production from the set made with carefully selected materials and accessories, collected worldwide during travels or shopped all around. They also realize the lighting in order to animate and magnify the subject by a play of angles and filters. They select or even realize themselves the costumes, make-up and hairdressing, sometimes with the help of the best specialists;
• Pierre photographs the scenery they have imagined together. Gilles then paints the unique print with successive layers of paint and glaze, exceeding reality. It results in a unique, perfectly aesthetic image that definitely cannot be done by any kind of digital software;
• finally, they conceive the specific frame that is an integral part of the work. Actually, they consider the frame as the extension of the image’s universe ;

Everything is considered in order to achieve an aesthetic perfection and a vision of an enchanted world, corresponding to their dreamed reality. As they state: “This is a little bit of photo, a little bit of painting. There is the idealization of the sopped moment; Gilles with his brush can go and go back, and there is no time limit.”

Their own universe always shows the same reoccurring idealized set of themes: stars and unknown friends, sailors and princes, saints and sinners, fairy paradises and lowest depths, popular iconography and magic, all mixed together in a world of love and grace.

“On aime idéaliser mais on parle aussi de la mort, du mystère et de l’étrangeté de la vie. Il y a autant de douceur que de violence dans nos images…”

Pierre & Gilles

(We like to idealise but we talk also of death, mystery and the strangeness of life. There is an equal amount of tenderness and violence in our images)

External resource:their official web site (and source of part of the text above)