A visit to Gilbert & George

A Gilbert & George house is located at 8 Fournier Street in London. They have lived in the same place since the sixties. They have restored it with the original 18th century furniture and keep various collections of 19th century ceramics and goldsmithery. They have a kitchen there that they have never used, not even once, and it only serves as a store for tea, coffee and milk.

All meals are at a restaurant twenty minutes away on foot, always the same. They tell us that years ago they bought the property at number 12 on the same street, which they now use for guests, and that for a long time they tried to buy number 10, but they were asking for too much money and decided, with the pragmatism that characterizes them, to give up "forever" and forget it. At the back of the house, in a rather large courtyard, they have built their studio, made of two identical buildings that communicate with each other. They boast that absolutely the entire manufacturing process of their works (“except the framing”) is done in there in that studio: this includes the creation of images, always from photographs taken by them (they claim that they never 'have appropriated a single image made by another person, something unusual in the age of the internet), its manipulation with sophisticated editing programs to create strange and shocking textures and combinations, and finally also its printing.

All the images that will later serve as a basis for their manipulation are cataloged in endless folders that they call the "alphabet". And all his exhibitions are prepared with detailed scale models (with the paintings hung, of course) that he has kept since the beginning of his career. Even more pragmatism: with this obsession to do everything themselves and in there, they explain to me that they don't have anything uploaded to the cloud (they don't want anyone to have access to their visual databases, or their finished works) and they keep everything on their own servers, "three identical ones, for security", distributed in different secret places in the city. The visit lasts a couple or three hours. We rehearse for a while and talk quietly. I hope they serve us Ruinart champagne as I thought they used to do, even if they don't drink it (they love this brand because of the name, “Ruin-Art”), but they only bring water. They ask us for news from Paris and Barcelona and say that London is in good shape, they are very optimistic about the city and England in general. Then they make a couple or three politically incorrect comments, similar to those that have already caused them some displeasure, and the visit is over.