Cyprien Gaillard
13 Nov - 16 Dec 2012
CYPRIEN GAILLARD
Rubble and Revelation
13 November – 16 December 2012
Like an archeologist probing the wreckage of modernity, Cyprien Gaillard travels the world looking for monuments of our era that have lost their aura and symbolic power, and with the precision of a research scientist, he documents their life and gradual disappearance. He roams nomadically from continent to continent, encountering ruins and relics that are immortalized in photos, videos, sculptures, and collages which convey his obsession with the poetry of decay.
With the gaze of a documentary maker and a dramatically raw aesthetic, Cyprien Gaillard reflects on the destruction—as well as decadence—that follow social and cultural transformations. Gaillard’s work is a study of iconoclasm, vandalism and the power of images: the artist traces the ways in which history is perennially rewritten, highlighting subtle links between past and present, and between different cultures and contexts marked by violent transformations and signs of disintegration—an area of research that has grown all the more topical in this era of street protests and popular uprisings.
Architecture, with its globalized commercial symbols and its effigies of power, is a discipline that fascinates Gaillard because of its ability to deeply influence human behavior. Modernist buildings, rundown neighborhoods on the outskirts of town, crumbling highrises and skyscrapers, and military fortresses and bunkers serve as the setting for a “Natural History of Destruction” (to cite the essays by the German writer W.G. Sebald on the devastation produced by air raids during World War II); within it, Gaillard highlights the dynamics that govern social interaction, the relationship between the individual and the group—specifically, in the youth subcultures of urban gangs and tribes—where categories such as freedom and the right to choose no longer apply, and everything seems to happen as if guided by mass will.
All of these forces can be found in the project Rubble and Revelation for the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, the first major solo exhibition by Cyprien Gaillard in Italy. The project is housed in the military bakery of Caserma XXIV Maggio, a fascinating gem of industrial architecture built in Romanesque Revival style in 1898 and closed in 2005, after having been used for over a century to supply bread to all the military complexes in Lombardy, and after nourishing the entire city of Milan during World War II. Inside the spaces of the military bakery, with their patina of memories, Cyprien Gaillard leads us through his evocative vision of the ruins of our time: in a constant crescendo of juxtapositions and layerings, videos, photographs, images, and sounds trace a path that weaves between explosions and silences, devastation and contemplation.
Rubble and Revelation
13 November – 16 December 2012
Like an archeologist probing the wreckage of modernity, Cyprien Gaillard travels the world looking for monuments of our era that have lost their aura and symbolic power, and with the precision of a research scientist, he documents their life and gradual disappearance. He roams nomadically from continent to continent, encountering ruins and relics that are immortalized in photos, videos, sculptures, and collages which convey his obsession with the poetry of decay.
With the gaze of a documentary maker and a dramatically raw aesthetic, Cyprien Gaillard reflects on the destruction—as well as decadence—that follow social and cultural transformations. Gaillard’s work is a study of iconoclasm, vandalism and the power of images: the artist traces the ways in which history is perennially rewritten, highlighting subtle links between past and present, and between different cultures and contexts marked by violent transformations and signs of disintegration—an area of research that has grown all the more topical in this era of street protests and popular uprisings.
Architecture, with its globalized commercial symbols and its effigies of power, is a discipline that fascinates Gaillard because of its ability to deeply influence human behavior. Modernist buildings, rundown neighborhoods on the outskirts of town, crumbling highrises and skyscrapers, and military fortresses and bunkers serve as the setting for a “Natural History of Destruction” (to cite the essays by the German writer W.G. Sebald on the devastation produced by air raids during World War II); within it, Gaillard highlights the dynamics that govern social interaction, the relationship between the individual and the group—specifically, in the youth subcultures of urban gangs and tribes—where categories such as freedom and the right to choose no longer apply, and everything seems to happen as if guided by mass will.
All of these forces can be found in the project Rubble and Revelation for the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, the first major solo exhibition by Cyprien Gaillard in Italy. The project is housed in the military bakery of Caserma XXIV Maggio, a fascinating gem of industrial architecture built in Romanesque Revival style in 1898 and closed in 2005, after having been used for over a century to supply bread to all the military complexes in Lombardy, and after nourishing the entire city of Milan during World War II. Inside the spaces of the military bakery, with their patina of memories, Cyprien Gaillard leads us through his evocative vision of the ruins of our time: in a constant crescendo of juxtapositions and layerings, videos, photographs, images, and sounds trace a path that weaves between explosions and silences, devastation and contemplation.