Garden of the Self
He has come home, where he was meant to be, grounded and rooted.
After years spent wandering the world, taking on multiple heteronyms to better express his many facets (including Gilles Dusabe, 2010-2025), Gilles Gabriel Grassioulet is embarking on another journey. It is no longer about traversing the world, but returning to a territory closer to home and, paradoxically, more vast: that of the self.
On the hills of Kigali, his house, studio, and especially his garden become the places of this inquiry. Each morning, he walks alone. He maintains, observes, harvests, allows growth, and returns. These repeated gestures become a ritual of presence in the world. The garden is therefore not only a space he cultivates: it becomes a space in which he learns to be.
What unfolds in the garden continues in the studio. The same materials circulate between garden, body, and artwork. Turmeric enters his compositions as pigment, but also belongs to his daily practices. For him, nothing he uses is external to the one who uses it. An environment conducive to self-sufficiency.
This is perhaps where the garden of the self begins: not a landscape one could find intact, but a surrealist landscape that recomposes itself through traces, accumulated gestures, and lived experiences: photographic glass plates bequeathed by his father, sewing gestures transmitted from his mother’s side, introspective journeys to Ibiza, medicinal plants, natural pigments, glass, burnt wood, black walls.
This way of making the garden a space of inquiry finds resonance with certain figures in art history, from Edward Steichen to Claude Monet at Giverny, for whom the garden becomes far more than a motif: a space constructed to heal, observe, contemplate, paint. One also hears Thoreau’s call to withdraw and live closest to the essential. For Gilles Gabriel, however, the garden does not become a subject to represent. It becomes a condition of practice.
For he does not simply draw what he sees. He composes. Oil-painted glass is one of the places of this transformation: light reveals as much as it passes through, and shadow becomes another form of drawing. Membranes made from recovered and sewn paper extend this same gesture: surfaces of passage between what is projected, what is drawn, and what is perceived.
This logic echoes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thinking: to perceive is never to passively receive an image of the world, but a constant movement between the one who looks and what is looked at. His body walks in the garden, selects, touches, observes. Then, in the studio, he begins again differently. The gesture does not come after perception: it is its extension.
Before the work, the spectator too is in active perception. From a distance, forms appear as abstract masses. Drawing closer, they become precise, then escape again. The work does not deliver a definitive image: it asks the eye to work and imagine, for emptiness is far from nothingness.
His years in Japan nourished this way of looking: an attention to space, silence, interval. The Ma, this conception of space as active interval, finds a direct echo in his works, where what is not visible weighs as much as what appears. His drawing is thus less an affirmation than a listening. An openness that perhaps explains the slowness of his work, and this serene determination to return, again and again, to the same garden, the same gestures, the same materials.
Return to the self. Return to meaning. Return to the garden. Return to gesture. Return to matter. Return to sight.
But each return changes the one who comes back.
The garden of the self is not behind Gilles Gabriel Grassioulet. It builds itself in the present, through this daily relationship with the living, traces, matter, and sight. Perhaps this is what he seeks today: not to represent the world, but to rediscover a way of inhabiting it. The garden offers him its threshold, the work becomes its extension, and the spectator’s gaze, in turn, becomes its place and its consciousness.
Text by Nelson Niyakire
