About | Sarah Gilbert Painter Artist

INTERVIEW FOR OBTUSE ARCHIVE
BY SELIN KIR - LONDON, JUNE 2025

Your work appears both introspective and performative, built as staged

constructions. How do these intimate, theatrical scenes first take shape for you? What typically initiates a new composition: a spatial idea, a visual fragment, a formal challenge?

The conceptualisation of my work begins with an accumulation of both digital and physical material. I build image banks organised into distinct typologies: one for spatial structures, such as architecture, video games, stage design, rugs, furniture, and wallpapers, and another for figures, including comedians, celebrities, athletes, clothing, makeup, and masks. These raw materials come together in Photoshop, where I create collages and digital compositions, quick iterations drawn from a whirlpool of images, casual phone pictures, internet research, drawings, and magazine paint-overs. I distort and test rapidly. It’s an experimental space where images can be transformed endlessly.

After this initial phase, I move toward isolating elements. It becomes a process of purification, and also of introspection, in which the material is refined and a deeper self-awareness begins to emerge. At this point, the choices I make must resonate with my immediate experience, whether through a certain emotional texture, a personal concern, or something eloquent. I then bring everything together, architectural constructs and figures, into a single scene, using 3D software to simulate architectural depth, volumetric space, and precise lighting and shadows.

You describe beginning your process digitally, constructing compositions through Photoshop and 3D tools. What does that preparatory phase involve? What tools, processes, or decision-making systems are at play before a brush touches the canvas? What kinds of possibilities or constraints emerge in that shift from the fluid logic of digital design to the tactile resistance of paint?

I use Photoshop and a 3D software to construct my scenes. This allows me to simulate architectural depth, lighting, and the positioning of figures with a great deal of precision. It’s like staging a theater set: I can rotate the scene, adjust the viewpoint, and test relationships between elements before anything becomes fixed. In a way, I become a kind of stage designer of my little world, composing the space, directing the atmosphere, and arranging the figures. Every element is positioned with intention, and the emotional and spatial dynamics are tested and refined before being translated into paint.

For the figures, I use a 3D process called rigging: creating a digital skeleton beneath the surface of the model, which allows me to pose and animate them. I can bend an arm, tilt a head, or twist a torso with a lot of control, adjusting each body’s attitude, and spatial relationship to the others. It’s a bit like operating a marionette, pulling strings to suggest a posture or a state of mind.
I push the digital phase as far as I can.
The prepictural work is intensely detailed, but I always try to leave space for coincidence once I begin painting. Failing to do so would endanger my practice and reduce it to mere coloring or figuration.

I’m also acutely aware of the problem of proletarianization that arises with technical processes. The philosopher Bernard Stiegler introduced this concept in the third volume of Technics and Time (2001). He uses it to describe the automation of individual knowledge through technology, and the resulting loss of spontaneity and personal savoir-faire. When producing a technically correct object that is entirely controlled and deprived from accident and passion, a form of imprisonment emerges, one that I am not willing to accept.

What is the point of painting if it is only about executing a pleasing image? If that were my goal, I could stop at the digital stage and sell printed outputs. But painting, for me, is not about producing a commodity. It carries a singularity, something deeply personal. It is in the mess, the unresolved, and the unexpected that something truly alive and unique can appear.

The act of painting is the real transcendental moment, the performance. It is unpredictable. A painting either works or it doesn’t. Its success seems to depend on something invisible, an equation involving gesture, texture, the qualities of the paint, the specificity of the materials, the physical presence of the work, the relation between one sign and another, between one color and the next. The act of painting has little to do with my initial intentions. It resists figuration, and it resists control. Painting is, at its core, a battle.

The faces in your paintings often appear multiplied, disassembled, or stylised to the point of estrangement. What informs their appearance? Are these figures grounded in real individuals, or do they arise through digital morphing, memory distortions, or symbolic recombination?

The faces in my paintings, are often comedians, masked performers or celebrities expressing emotions. Sometimes they originate from athletes, friends, or kabuki actors, but these references are quickly distorted and fragmented. Through this process of manipulation, the figures begin to lose their attachment to narrative
or identity. At a certain point, figuration becomes secondary; what matters is no longer who the figure is, but what forces animate it, beyond the spectacle.

The face becomes the empty shell through which an invisible force is made visible. That force manifests through the distortion it leaves behind: a twisted mouth, an elongated cheekbone, a flattened nose. Rendering that invisible strength visible is the ultimate task.These distortions are the evidence of a struggle, an imprint of invisible collisions between invisible states and exterior form. I am more interested in this intensity, when there is a form of rupture or chaos that is piercing through the resemblance. The face collapses under pressure, and in doing so, reveals a more fundamental truth. As Deleuze wrote in The Logic of Sensation, describing Bacon’s paintings: “the extraordinary agitation of these heads is derived from the forces of pressure, dilation, contraction, flattening, and elongation that are exerted on the immobile head.” It is in this same way that I approach the figure: as a zone of intensity, when the visible bears the weight of the invisible, and the body, under pressure is trying to escape itself.

Your compositions often incorporate strict architectural geometries, grids, vanishing points, structural motifs, interrupted by looser figurative or textural elements. How do you approach the tension between structure and disruption in
your work?

I tend to produce a work of precision, of formal restriction and geometric strictness. In architecture, there is a tradition of formal rigour inherited from the International Bauhaus and American minimalism of the 60’s. I’m interested in those principles of conceptual coldness, as well as mathematical composition and repetitions. But there is also a sort of a rage against the given imagery that pushes me to disrupt, to mishandle it, a desire to extract something more. I’m not exactly sure where that comes from, to be honest, but I need a clash, an element of disruption. Collage, and the question of the point of view as developed in Cubism by Cézanne, Braque and Picasso, has always been important to me. The problems revealed by the confrontation of different points of view on the same surface have certainly shaped my approach and defined my operating mode. I often bring a small scene or territory into tension with other given elements, figures, or objects. These objects are not simply placed carefully on a grid, they enter into a kind of friction with one another.

You’ve cited influences as varied as Kabuki theatre, gaming interfaces, and the aesthetics of psycho-power. What kind of visual vocabulary does this collision of references generate for you? How do these inform the visual systems you build? Are they conceptual anchors or aesthetic reference points?

My works inhabit a fictional arena where the race for attention, as described by Bernard Stiegler’s notion of psychopower, highlights the fragility of the human condition in an age dominated by marketing, labor, and self-representation.
As Stiegler puts it: “[...] about anyone can access technologies of captivation, post-production, indexation, diffusion, and promotion, technologies that were, until now, industrial functions hegemonically controlled by what I have called the psychopower of marketing and the culture industries.” I explore the fragility and precariousness of postmodern identity in this landscape of marketing-driven

competition. The visual vocabulary that emerges in my work is one of opposition, fragmentation, and distortion, as well as elevation and escapism, as a kind of resistance to the alienating effects of psychopower.

In gaming interfaces, characters often attempt to escape their worlds, moving through increasingly elevated realms, layers and planes stacked upon one another, often punctuated by explosions. This aesthetic of movement and rupture informs my work. Similarly, in Kabuki theatre, performers enact heightened emotions, and I’m fascinated by how violence and passion are given form. The elaborate costumes, makeup, and bold use of color and pattern reflect tensions between social classes, and dramatize power struggles of domination and submission.

In your recent exhibition at Rabbet Gallery, your work was placed in a dialogue with Jérémie Magar’s. How do you consider the environments your paintings inhabit, be they the gallery wall, adigital screen, or a constructed scene within the

painting itself? How does context shift the way the image breathes or performs?

The show "Worlds and Scenes" at Rabbet Gallery was a very interesting experience. Jérémie and I have been friends for a long time, and we know each other’s artistic evolution well. We’ve had many conversations about it over the years, often in our respective studios, sharing thoughts and directions.

Jérémie’s work is process-led. He used to be a painter but made the conscious decision to move away from image-making, embracing instead the impermanence of ephemeral installations. Voluntarily studio-less now, he works in direct response to a space, gathering found materials from the location’s surroundings, and his own, and creating the installation intuitively, on site. His contribution to the exhibition responded to the architecture of Rabbet Gallery with immediacy, creating a strong, resonant dialogue with my own work. It was quite stunning to see how elements of his practice echoed within my paintings and, in turn, how aspects of mine seemed to surface in his installation. There was a shared language, an overlap of forms and materials, that neither of us had anticipated. I pay close attention to the physical presence and energetic dimension of my work in space. The way a painting resists or absorbs light is important to me, the relationship it establishes with the viewer’s body, how walking past it can shift perception, how the eye travels across the surface of the canvas. I’m also attentive to how the work interacts with the architecture: does it shrink in the space, or does it seem to expand as a new territory?

Can you tell us more about your studio setup and materials? How do you organise your working environment, and what kinds of surfaces, paints, or tools are integral to your process?

I spend a lot of time in front of my computer at the beginning of the process, developing compositions, testing ideas, and working through digital sketches. Alongside that, I also do paint-over magazine sessions, working directly onto printed images as a kind of loose, intuitive practice. Once I move to the physical stage, I mainly use acrylics and oil paint, and occasionally incorporate gloss paint for specific effects. I used to work on aluminum sheets, but I’ve since shifted my focus entirely to canvas, which offers a more yin kind of materiality. I sometimes sand the acrylic paint to create marble or concrete-like effects, and I also use this technique to introduce layers of transparency.

For precision and structure, I use a system of masking tape to define shapes and edges. It’s an important part of how the image comes together.
I also sometimes use an airbrush to introduce subtle gradients or shifts in texture.

My working environment tends to be quite organized, especially around the tools and materials. At the moment, I work at home, in my living room. It shapes the way I engage with the work, making the process more immediate into my daily life.

Your figures are expressive yet abstracted, emotive yet fragmented. Do you see them as narrative characters, symbolic figures, or something more hybrid-avatars, emotional proxies, speculative bodies?

Narration is everywhere, but I do everything I can to keep it secondary. I’m very interested in the concept of the "empty shell" when it comes to my figures, which is linked to the idea of modulation (internal mould). The empty shell, or avatar, can host different forces and personalities. In Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe’s project No Ghost Just a Shell, they purchased the rights to a low-cost Manga character named Annlee from a Japanese agency that creates characters for cartoons and video games. By buying her, they rescued her from disappearing entirely. Parreno and Huyghe then invited other artists to freely use this avatar in their own works. This notion of modulation plays out on the surface of the skin in my paintings. I often let the figure grow out from the edges, allowing form to emerge at the boundaries. This process helps to develop a conceptual foundation, where the figure is ever becoming rather than being a fixed identity.

And finally, what’s unfolding on the horizon of your practice? Are there new materials, structures, or lines of inquiry beginning to surface?

I think I would like to push the work on figures even further, bringing them into close-up, at a 1:1 scale, to intensify their presence and relatability. As a way to conjure how affects and desires are continuously exploited, manipulated, and commodified in our society, I want to present the figure at life-size and in closer proximity, revealing more clearly both the vulnerability and the power at play.