Room 9

Hervé Guibert (Paris, 1955–1991) was a French critic, writer, and photographer. In 1990, he published To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, which immediately became a landmark of literary postmodernism, not just because it revealed his HIV-positive status, equivalent at the time to a death sentence, but also because of its disembodied and shameless exercise in autofiction.

Miquel Barceló was his friend in his final years and appeared as the central character in two of his novels under the name Yannis: L’Homme au chapeau rouge (The Man in the Red Hat) and Le Paradis (Paradise), published the year after Guibert’s death. In 1990, the painter created several portraits of him, which the writer described thus: “Meanwhile, Yannis was painting me moribund, a death’s head under a red hat with two incandescent blue eyes... Slapping the paint on three or four portraits a day then trashing them, laying them on the floor and spraying them with a corrosive acid that disfigures the face ... And he [said]: ‘I’ve got your soul’”. These still unreleased portraits are a vital testament to the intellectual relationship that the painter established with key French cultural figures, but also to the practical limits of representing absence, of imbuing death onto the canvas as the limit of painting. As Barceló wrote in his recent autobiography, “To paint is to erase”.