Galerie Babel opens in St Germain

Text Elisabeth Fourmont

If it has been Armageddon for the art market lately, one upshot is that places are opening for newer artists where one wouldn’t expect.  On the rue Guénéguad in the heart of Saint Germain des Prés, you can find African art, design furniture, and fashion-edge photography, but also local painter Denis Gérablie, 40, (pictured) who this spring opened Galerie Babel in a space that formerly exhibited Man Ray.

The name references the Tower of Babel, because buildings appear unfixed in his paintings, but it’s about something more fluid than a tumble of bricks and mortar he says. “My houses are like trees.  They can grow, wilt, sway in the wind.  Walking in these cities I create, there is something vegetable about it, like walking in a forest.”  He was inspired in part by the French word for real estate, immobilier. “Immobile. I think I reacted against this term. And I think my paintings are also a reaction against a world that is wooden and heavy.  I always thought houses were closed off by walls, and very serious," he says.

Gérablie’s aesthetic is infused by color and wit, and also the little people that inhabit his world, which he calls the schmurptz.  ¨It’s as if I wanted to resolve the problem of a human being in a city.  A human being isn’t made to live in a city.  But a schmurptz is made for it.  The schmurptz and the houses go peacefully together.”

His technique evolved from a hybrid education in the classic masters and bande dessiné.  Early in his career he worked as a reproductionist, selling hundreds of copies of Monet and Renoir, but before that he spent his childhood years consuming comics and sketching.  “I advise this for any young artist; it’s indispensable for the imagination,” Gérablie says.

Gérablie runs the gallery himself, when he isn’t painting, and for the moment shows only his own work.

Galerie Babel

15 rue Guénégaud

75006 Paris

Metro Pont Neuf, Odéon, St-Michel

Open Tuesday to Sunday 3-7pm