The American-Portuguese artist and director has been invited to the Lambert Collection for his first major exhibition in France.
Internationally renowned for his films (Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week for the feature film Diamantino in 2018), he will present in Avignon the full richness of his work, which combines video installations, films, paintings, and drawings, where new technologies meet poetry with power and elegance.
In the rooms of the Hôtel de Montfaucon, he will present a series of recent drawings, paintings, and videos, including the large installation Bardo Loops, commissioned in 2024 by the CAM Gulbenkian in Lisbon and exhibited on the occasion of the reopening of its modern art center.
Through this multitude of media, which he approaches with disconcerting virtuosity, Gabriel Abrantes depicts a strange world in which algorithms and artificial intelligence seem to have taken over.

The formal vocabulary derived from the digital world and 3D as used by major entertainment companies (Pixar, Disney) unfolds from one room to another, from a drawing to a painting or a video installation, so that it becomes the one and only means of representing the world of tomorrow. The human figure is almost absent, replaced by rats, ghosts, or robots whose “all too human” behaviors and character traits hold up a disturbing mirror to ourselves.

Trapped in limbo amid apocalyptic scenery, the characters engage in impossible conversations whose dialogues seem to draw directly from the controversies and divisive discussions found on social media and rolling news channels. We see them arguing or singing about the despair caused by loneliness or the end of an unthinkable love, floating on the ruins of a world that climate change, violence, and digital revolutions have irrevocably transformed.

They appear to us alone, trapped in endless digital loops, prey to existential questions where the intimate mingles with the political, where tragedy and farce are continually intertwined.

Yet the darkness is constantly tempered by the poetry that emanates from these vulnerable and sensitive beings, whom we follow with an almost natural empathy.
For therein lies the artist’s intelligence: inventing situations in which the acuity of an implacable gaze on the contemporary world unfolds in a skillful distancing where optimism gracefully draws us into an existential reflection that could bring us together.