PRESENΤΑΤΙΟΝ: Cyprien Gaillard-Humpty\Dumpty

Cyprien Gaillard’s work navigates geographical sites and psychological states, addressing the relationship between architecture and nature, and evolution and erosion. Using a variety of artistic mediums ranging from painting and sculpture to photography, film, and video, Gaillard juxtaposes pictorial beauty and the atmospherically lush with elements of sudden violence, destruction, and idiosyncrasy culled from popular culture, pointing to the precarious nature of public space, social ritual, and the very viability of the notion of civilization.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Palais de Tokyo Archive

Cyprien Gaillard’s new project “Humpty \ Dumpty” takes the form of an exhibition in two chapters that are presented simultaneously at the Palais de Tokyo and at Lafayette Anticipations. With this project, he offers a reflection upon time – its traces, its effects, and the relationships that humans form with  it. Inspired by the current era, one in which Paris is frenetically restoring its most prestigious monuments whilst erasing marks of wear and tear in preparation for the Olympic Games, Cyprien Gaillard reveals how the city acts a privileged terrain for the expression of entropy (degradation, disorder and unpredictability), and how, in return, humans seem compelled to fight against this process. Exploring the margins, the nooks and crannies, and the spaces of dissent, he probes our desires for order, permanence and consistency whilst seeking out narratives that point to possible new forms of equilibrium.  “Humpty \ Dumpty” has been three years in the making. Its title draws on the 18th-century English nursery rhyme, popularised by Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in which an egg-shaped character falls off a wall, cracks, and despite multiple attempts, couldn’t be repaired. “I also wanted a title that deflates the expectation of me not having a show in my hometown for 12 years”, he says. At the Palais de Tokyo, “Humpty”, the first chapter of the exhibition, presents selection of works that have never been shown before in France, as well as others by invited artists. Through evocations of the relationship between the body and architecture, abandoned territories, war and invasive species, Cyprien Gaillard paints a portrait of our relations to collapse and to reconstruction. In doing so, he offers a portrait in negative of our obsession with the preservation of beings and the conservation of things, and the permanent temptation to maintain or return to a certain order of the world. Gaillard’s 2019 film “Ocean II Ocean”, which premiered at the 58th Venice Biennale, begins with footage from metro stations in the former Soviet Bloc, where marble walls are embedded with fossilised sea life. The second half follows a fleet of retired New York subway cars as they’re dumped into the Atlantic, creating an aquatic cemetery and ultimately, an artificial reef for marine life. It’s a tale of two oceans, separated by time and geography, tied together in a vortex of constant renewal of man-made and natural systems. Another film, “Formation” (2022) is dominating the colossal curved hall of the Palais de Tokyo with long, slit-like dimensions of 50m x 6m – depicts the cyclical movement of rose-ringed parakeets (native to India) through Königsallee, a high-end retail street in Düsseldorf. ‘The interesting thing with their flight pattern is that they always fly on the dot in the last half hour of sunlight, rain or shine, all year long,’ he describes. ‘It’s almost as though they’ve taken on the German rigour.’ For the second chapter of the exhibition “Dumpty” at Lafayette Anticipations, Cyprien Gaillard is giving new life to a work that has fallen into oblivion. A monumental sculpture installed since 1979 in the heart of Paris, Jacques Monestier’s automaton Le “Défenseur du Temps” a unique clock, consists of a man perched on a rock carrying a sword and a shield. The last movements of the automaton took place in 2003, and it has since been abandoned to the effects of time, against which it was trying to protect us. For this exhibition, Cyprien Gaillard is working on its rebirth. The restoration of the automaton, at the centre of an opera in which it is the main actor, is put into perspective with the impossible return of the in perspective with the impossible return of a friend of the of the artist, who disappeared a few years earlier. At the end of the exhibition, “Défenseur du Temps” will be reinstalled, renovated, in its original location. Inspired by the times, when Paris was frantically restoring its most prestigious monuments and Gaillard reveals how the city is a privileged terrain for the expression of disorder, and how humans try to fight against these traces. It is in the margins, the nooks and crannies, and the spaces of dissidence that the artist probes our desires for order and permanence and finds the narratives of possible new balances.

Exhibited artists: Giorgio de Chirico, Cyprien Gaillard, Käthe Kollwitz, Robert Smithson and Daniel Turner.

Photo: Cyprien Gaillard, Ocean II Ocean, HD video, color, sound, 10:56 min, 2019, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Sprüth Magers (Berlin – Los Angeles) © Cyprien Gaillard

Info: Curators: Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel, Assistant Curator: Clément Raveu, Palais de Tokyo, 13 avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, France, Duration: 19/10/2022-8/1/2023, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 12:00-24:00, https://palaisdetokyo.com/ and Lafayette Anticipations – Galeries Lafayette Corporate Foundation, 9 Rue du Plâtre, Paris, France, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed, Fri-Sun 11:00-19:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.lafayetteanticipations.com/