A distant friendship for oneself

by Jean Calens

A blue shirt collar is the title of text fragments at the core of Gilles Sage’s artistic practice. Linked by both a worried and amused intimate investigation, in these short paragraphs appear the delicate question of how to apply a kindly self-control on one’s urges and affects.In front of the public, Gilles Sage gives a pared-down and singular form of performed reading.

How to draw the substance of minuscule facts and situations that are however cumbersome? Gilles Sage’s writing highlights less about what is exceptional or remarkable than the mechanics of everyday life. Sliced by the author into monotonous exchanges with his contemporaries, those instances appear absurd and lightly disturbing by dint of being so ordinary. The narrator has to find them a sense at risk of being overwhelmed by doubt and losing his mind. Gilles Sage invents a kind of minimal existential art without any excess or embellishment. Methodically and strictly, he tries to protect himself from a potential excessive subjectivity which is considered variable.

But the relationship with oneself remains nevertheless unaccountable! In the course of the tiny stories, details emerge, unsettling, to be so common. It seems they make a docile landmark ready to supply an interpretation. But they resist as a part of an unsolved enigma, simply marking observations out.

What is that inner eye that self-reify us by tearing our intentions, comings and goings to shreds? Who or what makes the character of the text coldly and logically analyzing libidinal moments? By listening to Gilles reading in a thrown light aureole, standing up, stiff and stone-faced, we understand it’s also about our condition of subject without any particular qualities. He alerts, we may hear.

It serves no purpose but it grips…

Behind the grid of the timetable of all the aspects of our lives, set by a more and more conformist society (in which we delightfully concur with, suggests the artist) appears the fragile, disconcerted and doubting human being. Even doubting about the idea of his own liberty.

Irreversibly, this being is led back to his ordinary personal condition. The assessment of this true-false private diary, produced by a supposed intransigent loneliness, sounds familiar to everybody. Here’s the moving efficacy of these fragments: it takes us on board of the fragile bark of this existential solitude, typical of our times overrun with network so-called social. This mirror we got shows us the image of our own lives, defined by codes, conventions, tyrannical beliefs and various narcissistic rituals.

The tone of these fragments is lightly fatalistic with a slight bitterness touch. But never forget the performed readings are funny, cruelly funny, especially in the resentful state!

Gilles Sage deals with humour the pathetic of the daily life, its misunderstandings and mini disasters. A blue shirt collar, authentic work in progress with its sober aesthetics asks a vertiginous question: are we the producers of our own alienation?

November 2017