Mapping the middle ground between apparent opposites, Parisian multi- disciplinary artist Cyprien Gaillard distills the vandalism, decay and banality of urban architecture into images of unlikely beauty. Mirroring the world as he perceives it, housing-estate riots translate as modern-medieval battlefields within his film “Fictive Wars V”, while unforgiving post-war tower-blocks become relics of an unrealised utopia set amid rural Dutch 17th Century landscapes in his “Belief in the Age of Disbelief” series of etchings. His most recent photographic and film work, the “Glasgow Series”, captures stoic structures both on the verge and in the moment of demolition. His projected reality may be bleak, but it is equally romantic. “I have this idea that there will be a new harmony within the contemporary landscape,” Gaillard begins emphatically. “I’m interested in tower- blocks as sculptures, as relics of our entropic landscape. Somehow I’ve found simplicity and beauty in landscapes that others find ugly.”
Following a maxim to uncover the exotic within the everyday, Gaillard sees his immediate environs, as well as the extended international landscape of city and suburbia, as endless sites for inspiration. His artistic inclinations are derived, and continue to extend from, the city and its concrete terrain – the landscape within which he grew up, interacting with the streets through skateboarding and graffiti. “I was quite an angry teen and wanted to destroy and vandalise things, but I also wanted to create,” he explains. “Art was a way to continue this lifestyle... because art is a shelter somehow, and actions that don’t make sense anywhere else, make sense in the art world.”
Taking direction from the Land Artists of the 70s, particularly Robert Smithson, Gaillard’s finished artworks are, he says, documentation of the ‘real’ work created outside. “I work in reality, and fill the art world with the real world,” he says. “I can’t say my work is related to Robert Smithson’s, it would be too arrogant... but I feel very close to his work. I’m continuing his notion of entropy and decay.” Post-war structures and the jarring landscape they create fascinate Gaillard, who is appalled by the general disdain for such architecture. Traveling to Glasgow each month, he has been recording the ongoing destruction of the city’s residential tower-blocks. “It’s so sad to be nostalgic at only 26, but I am. There’s nothing I can do to save these towers,” he laments. “These buildings should exist because they’re historical, they’re part of the city and the skyline. I see them as ruins... as modern castles or fortresses that we allow to be demolished.”
With melancholia as a muse, Gaillard’s affection for oft-derided architecture has spawned a large-scale, and somewhat eccentric, concept, “My idea is to buy a large piece of land in the south of France – I want to turn it into a theme park. It will house resurrected tower blocks from around the world,” Gaillard enthuses. “All my work until now is leading up to this park. I’m struggling with the fact that I can’t rescue all the structures that are being knocked down in front of my eyes. These buildings need a place to exist as monuments, as historical remnants to be protected and remembered.”