Cyprien Gaillard
dal 1/11/2006 al 15/12/2006
Segnalato da
1/11/2006
Cyprien Gaillard
Laura Bartlett Gallery, London
Gaillard’s series Real Remnants of Fictive Wars are films of explosions in the landscape that the artist has carried out since 2001. Part V, on view in this exhibition, is a 35mm film that slowly pans the balustrade of a chateau, traveling against a growing cloud of smoke that erupts from distant trees.
The Lake Arches
Laura Bartlett Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of The Lake
Arches, the first exhibition in the UK by Parisian artist Cyprien
Gaillard.
“There is more poetry, more that is accidental…in a single tree which
has endured the years and the seasons, than in the entire facade of a
palace. One must ruin a palace to make it an object of interest."
Diderot (1767)
Cyprien Gaillard’s series Real Remnants of Fictive Wars are films of
explosions in the landscape that the artist has carried out since
2001. Part V, on view in this exhibition, is a 35mm film that slowly
pans the balustrade of a chateau, traveling against a growing cloud of
smoke that erupts from distant trees. Aggressive and mesmeric, these
acts of temporary vandalism unsettle and reinstate the composure of
the classical environs.
Gaillard’s form of Land art has developed from within the urban
landscape of housing estates and high-rise buildings outwards to the
countryside and classical architecture, similar to Robert Smithson’s
gradual move from the suburbs of New Jersey to the desert. Gaillard’s
interest in disruption within the workings of the picturesque, in
entropy and decay, has its roots in current political and ecological
discord.
In Belief in the Age of Disbelief, Gaillard has introduced tower
blocks into 17th Century Dutch landscape etchings. These post-war
structures, once a symbol of utopian promise that have now come to
represent racial conflict, urban decay, criminality and violence, have
been seamlessly assimilated into a rural idyll. Some tower blocks have
been positioned in the etching like a defiant medieval fortress,
others as apocalyptic ruins. Like the paintings of Hubert Robert,
admired by Diderot, who depicted ancient ruins and even the imaginary
future ruins of the Louvre (1796), Gaillard comments on the
relationship between romanticism and decay, and architectures’
inherent communicative power.
Also in the exhibition Gaillard will show Geographical Analogies —the
artists' collection of polaroids that deal with entropic landscapes,
places that are eroding or de-composing. Displayed as if butterflies
under glass, the Analogies’ crystalline formations belie an intricate,
if exploded, taxonomy of concerns, from geopolitics to youth culture,
geology to art history.
Cyprien Gaillard (b.1980) graduated from L’Ecole Cantonale des Arts de
Lausanne in 2005. Gaillard will have a solo exhibition at Galerie
Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2007.
In conjunction with the exhibition there will be a Special Performance
on Wednesday November 22nd at 7.30pm at the top of St. Guys Hospital,
London Bridge (Lecture Theatre, 30th Floor). The event is free. Please
contact the gallery for more information.
Laura Bartlett Gallery
22 Leather Market Street - London