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In an article titled "La recherche de la perfection" ("The pursuit of perfection"), journalist Stéphanie Portal devotes several pages to this unusual path: that of a painter who came to watercolour in 2010, after twenty years spent in oil in the wake of Pieter Claesz and Johannes Vermeer — two masters of quiet still life whose influence, she writes, can be read even in the resolutely Dutch style of these compositions.

The article lingers on a constant curiosity: a habit, formed since childhood, of patiently observing the slow construction of things — the texture of a fruit, a fleeting reflection in glass or in a jug. This attention to detail, the journalist writes, is the very foundation of a painting that seeks less to be seen than to be felt: felt, heard, almost tasted.

She also describes an uncommon method, devised to recover in watercolour what oil made possible: adding egg white as a binder, so that true glazes can be layered — a second thought that water alone forbids. The chosen support, a satin-finish paper, is one of the hardest to master: pigment settles unevenly on it, forcing the painter to work gradients quickly and with a sure hand.

Throughout the interview, Stéphanie Portal notes a frank perfectionism — "an eternal malcontent," in the painter's own words — and a choice of subject that owes nothing to chance: still life, judged the most demanding of all genres, one that requires a perfect grasp of values and a pronounced taste for chiaroscuro and hushed atmospheres. The article closes with a brief portrait: born in Toulouse in 1967, self-taught, trained by his father and his architect uncle, exhibited in Italy, Japan and Luxembourg.

— Stéphanie Portal, Pratique des Arts (Watercolour section) Download the article (PDF, in French)

In an introductory text devoted to two works, La Forge and En Otra Vida, a close friend of the painter — a collector and keen observer — reflects on what, in his view, gives a painting its merit: talent joined to firmly held convictions, a timeless technique placed at the service of a powerful message, and a realism of objects and situations that invites the viewer to take part in the scene rather than admire it from afar.

He places Gilles Aguilera's work within a lineage both chosen and inherited: the French Caravaggisti, La Tour and the Le Nain brothers, then the great names of chiaroscuro and still life — Correggio, Heda, Claesz, Vermeer, Chardin, Corot. La Forge, painted in oil on canvas mounted on wood after the Le Nain painting, in his view retains intact all the power of the original work.

He goes on to discuss En Otra Vida, part of the Artefact series, an oil-on-wood painting elevated by amber glazes — and finds in it, he writes, the same "combined merits": those of a craft mastered down to the last detail, this time placed at the service of a commission born of mutual esteem.

— AC, foreword Download the foreword (PDF, in French)

En Otra Vida belongs to the Artefact series. A silver ewer, a bowl of fruit and a crystal glass — a piece from Saint-Louis crystal's "Bubbles" line — rest on a tablecloth embroidered with a monogram, a choice that is far from incidental to the author of this study. He sees in it a quiet tribute to the embroiderers of the past, and recounts how this detail revived for him the memory of a grandmother, herself an embroiderer, and of a craft now entirely lost.

He dwells at length on the drapery, on the harmony of a remarkable palette of greys binding together every object in the composition, and on the way light, distributed along the folds of the fabric, carries much of the painting's narrative on its own — to the point, he writes, of being "a painting within the painting."

The varnish, finally, is presented as a technical signature in its own right: a finish close to the old Dutch varnishes, whose amber-based formula — like that, it is said, of Stradivari's varnish — has never truly been reconstituted by modern chemistry.

The study also recalls a rule Gilles Aguilera scrupulously imposes on himself: never to reproduce the same subject twice, even if it means abandoning a composition already under way should it feel too close to a previous work.

— Excerpt from a study devoted to the work En Otra Vida Download the full study (PDF, in French)

Beyond these outside perspectives, there is a will to pass on what a long journey has made possible: a fascination with the glazes of the Flemish painters, particularly amber ones, whose history has left no trace of how they were made. Baltic amber macerated for five years in a solution kept secret, until a pure amber was obtained, clear as honey — a result that alone justified all that patience.

There is also the choice of pure realism over abstract or contemporary subjects — a taste for the true and the authentic, even against the grain of current trends — and the conviction that no technology will ever replace the brush or the painter's conviction.

— Gilles Aguilera Download the full text (PDF, in French)