ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Cyprien Gaillard
Winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2010, Cyprien Gaillard is currently one of the most prominent young French artists. His work compresses time and can be understood as an archaeology of the future in which the present is projected towards its entropy. His work, which reflects a trend described by the artist himself as “vandalism”, takes the form of sculptures, videos, engravings, photographs and interventions in public spaces. It brings out contemporary socio-political realities and the innate beauty of their brutality.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprueth Magers Gallery Archive
Cyprien Gaillard in his solo exhibition “Reefs to Rigs” presents new sculptures, photographs and his most recent film. Large wall-based sculptures circumscribe the gallery space, composed of impossibly thin limestone panels atop honeycomb aluminum structures. Swirling constellations of fossils are embedded within each panel, as is the cryptic logo of the New Jersey Transit commuter rail line (with its interlocking “N” and “J”) that connects the state’s cities and towns with the New York City metroplex. The works’ thick aluminum substrates, which protrude from the wall, lay bare the industrial, fabricated nature of each sculpture, as do inlaid screws, whose placement across one of the stone panels recreates, on a one-to-one scale, those found around the windows of a New York MTA subway car. This same arrangement is materialized in pink coral inlay in several other panels. “Ocean II Ocean” (2019), Gaillard’s film that premiered last year in the 58th Venice Biennale. The film is divided into two main sections that follow upon each other in an infinite loop. In the first, Gaillard’s camera focuses on fossils encrusted in the underground walls of metro stations in Russia and the former Soviet Bloc, such as Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kiev, Tblisi, and Berlin. Constructed by the Communist Regime as a propaganda tool to celebrate Soviet power and ingenuity, the stations are clad in marble quarried from various Soviet mountain ranges. The other half of “Ocean II Ocean” follows MTA subway cars on a journey across tracks, through bridges, onto barges, and then out to sea, ceremoniously dumped into the Atlantic Ocean in an effort to benefit aquatic life. Diving below the water’s surface, the camera captures marine animals moving among the steel carriages. Moreover, the frenetic energy of the film’s soundtrack, produced by Gaillard from samples of recordings of a steel pan orchestra, connects these stainless steel carcasses with the percussive sound of steel, as if its vibrations might be emanating from the train cars themselves. Connecting “Ocean II Ocean” two segments is a lush, albeit deceptive, vortex that is revealed to be a stainless steel New York public toilet, mid-flush. Its flowing movements link the work’s segments and avert any breakage in sound or image, emphasizing the cyclical nature not only of Gaillard’s film, but also of the shifting cycles of draining and rising that the world’s oceans have experienced and continue to undergo. In a series of new Polaroid diptychs, Gaillard pairs views of public restrooms with double-exposed compositions shot in Stockholm that extend the layered impulses of the film and sculptures. Glimpses of “Sea God (Sjöguden)”, a public sculpture by the Swedish artist Carl Milles, meld with images of the Stockholm underground, creating two layers of visual sedimentation. The subway stations’ staircases and platforms seem to stream in and out of the sea monster’s mouth.
Info: Sprueth Magers Gallery, 5900 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration 11/2-21/3/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, http://spruethmagers.com
