Guillaume Bijl: Multiples & Editions

More important to Guillaume Bijl (°1946) than the art courses he started in the 1960s and which he never completed were the administrative professions he pursued in the 1970s to earn a living. This 'university of life' in the lower middle class circuit made Bijl realise that art – even if it is conceptual – must represent a reality supported by the widest possible audience. In the meantime, Bijl has been building a consistent oeuvre for more than thirty years that he considers “realistic testimonies to visually deal with my time”. As a kind of European adept of appropriation art, an American art movement that emerged in the early 1980s with artists such as Jeff Koons and Cindy Sherman, Bijl reproduces existing images from everyday life almost literally with the aim of “the codes of our consumer society as image clichés of to expose themselves.”. Guillaume Bijl plays a delicate game with reality. In his installations and compositions he creates an everyday situation that seems familiar and completely familiar to us. He has copied a travel agency or a dog grooming salon so perfectly that fiction and reality have become inseparable. Guillaume Bijl thus holds up a mirror to us like a contemporary jester: as long as things appear to be what we think, then we will settle for them. We want to believe what we see.