Gilles Barbier’s exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery was part of Cote Ouest, a series of exhibitions of work by contemporary French artists on view in venues along the West Coast of the United States in the fall of 1999. In his fantastical work, Marseilles-based installation artist Gilles Barbier explores the suggestive ways that the systems we have invented to explain everything from the economy and human biology, psychology and natural history, genealogy and mechanical engineering, to linguistics and astronomy, variously overlap, impact one another and break down. Exploring the insights of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Barbier devised approaches that build on an inability to rationally distinguish one discipline and its discourses from another. Out of this intentionally disordered state, he generated paintings, sculpture, photographs, and videos that make literal his crazy and brilliant new models and hybrid schemes. In the Clones series, Barbier materialized multiple aspects of his fractured artistic persona as lifelike wax figures. Engaged in a variety of comic and perverse masquerades, these figures represent the particularity of the artist’s own personality and practice, while they also act as symbols of the very nature of human subjectivity.