Victor Garel, born in 2000, is currently in his final year at the Glasgow School of Art. His practice explores the narrative possibilities of the pictorial medium. Built around diverse elements—objects and characters whose common traits are their symbolic potential and the ambiguity of their presence—his compositions amplify the chaos that governs their relationships. Coexisting in transitional spaces—enclosed gardens, undefined interiors, or dystopian urban parks—Victor’s characters seem driven by inner urgencies that either bring them together or isolate them. When their paths collide, they create encounters ruled by intensity: mad love and fierce hatred, screams and tears, knives and caresses.

A wealth of literary, pictorial, and cinematic references feeds the autobiographical substrate of Victor’s work and culminates in compositions of extreme symbolic density. The prevailing feeling is undoubtedly strangeness. Strangeness of the unanimous seriousness displayed by characters engaged in absurd situations, strangeness of everyday objects turned into threats, nails, hearts, fishes, brushes, knives—all welcomed with the same composure. These cryptic narratives, fragments of endless stories, fundamentally question the absurdity of our daily reactions to the chaos of the world.

Victor’s practice is rooted in accumulation, through the drawing of various narrative elements that then migrate into his painting. This compulsive collection of shoes, spiders, missiles, and haunted telephones feeds a personal encyclopedia that the artist can later mobilize almost unconsciously. The construction of the painted works implies a refusal of construction, a narrative automatism, hence the repetition of certain forms whose symbolic richness Victor has not yet exhausted. The painting builds and unbuilds itself, multiplies narratives, opens mysterious paths, and refuses univocity.

The result is joyful and chaotic, strange and funny, a bit like the end of the world.

Text by Armand Camphuis