The Ephemerist

This one was sent to me today, and I like it ! However, I haven’t got the faintest idea where it’s from. If you know, tell me !

!! Update !! Apparently, this is an artwork by the French artist Gilles Barbier, about whom Kim Levin writes in The Village Voice (july 28, 2003) :

“Or look left, at Gilles Barbier’s equally ambivalent and hilariously deadpan take on the American hero. In this French artist’s life-size tableau, Nursing Home, our beloved comic-book superheroes have been aged since the year of their tabloid births, as if fictional archetypes of invincibility were subject to mortality, too. The Incredible Hulk, flabby and in tatters, vegetates in a wheelchair. Catwoman dozes. Superman leans on a walker. Mr. Fantastic dangles his overstretched limbs. And Captain America lies comatose on a gurney, attended by a decrepit Wonder Woman. The TV plays, but the sound is pure golden oldies from the Platters. This piece isn’t subtle. But it’s deserved: An artist from “Old Europe” has succeeded in suggesting (tempus fugit, sic transit gloria mundi, gotcha!) that others may have a more sophisticated understanding of superpowerdom than we have ourselves.”

(Thanks, you-know-who)