DAVID B.

Anne Barrault Gallery is very pleased to present the third exhibition of David B.
The exhibition will premiere two new sets of drawings: “the detective dead man” and “Nick Carter and André Breton: a surrealist inquiry”, which are the subjects of two books, respectively published by l’Association and Delcourt-Soleil.

A surrealist investigation

David B says there were initially two characters: the Young Detective and the Detective Dead man,whose creation coincided with the time after l’Ascension du Haut Mal, which threw the author into a state of idleness as destabilizing as morbid. “Something was dead inside me”. The Detective Dead man showed how it was difficult for him at the time (about 2014) to give an appearance to his fictitious characters. “At that point I started to turn to characters as signs, objects, and symbols”.

The girl with a thousand daggers corresponds to this disembodied character. On the contrary, with her bewitching head of hair –“what is most dear to women” Eudes de Châteauroux is reported to have said – calling to mind these twelfth century ladies described by Georges Duby, she embodies a vital principle. Together or separately, they give life to playlets full of literary references, in which images and texts combine, like death and life unite the detective and the girl. The “surrealist inquiry”, Nick Carter et André Breton invites us to another interweaving of text and image, but also fiction and reality. Based on the character of a serialized novel created in 1866 by J.R. Corvell, adapted in French from 1907 onwards and praised to the skies by the Surrealists-to-be, the inquiry relates the breathtaking journey of the American detective into the life of André Breton. The chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissection table, according to David B.

Erik Verhagen