Death, the great social equalizer, is the subject of Hans Holbein’s The Dance of Death: a collection of forty-one woodcuts illustrated by the German-Swiss master, and carved in Basel between 1523 and 1525 by blockcutter Hans Lützelburger. Across the procession, Holbein renders Death in his many disguises leading his subjects to their demise. Death comes for aristocracy and common folk alike, but Holbein’s morbid figure is kinder to some than others: he mercifully drives a ploughman’s horses for him as they leave together. In another scene, Death brutally impales a knight on his own lance. Obstructing Death is futile but those of us in the realm of the living might be compelled to preserve the ruins left in its wake. Cyprien Gaillard chronicles these ruins, offering mercy to what is ailing and aged: the ephemeral fragments of life overlooked or forgotten by most. After Death takes the ploughman, his plough remains. It’s this forgotten plough that Gaillard would be interested in, its very existence is an allegory for the human mind when the body itself is gone.
Preservation presides over authorship across Gaillard’s practice and ownership is entirely disregarded. It has to be. Take, for instance, the gargoyles from the Notre-Dame de Reims cathedral that were suspended in Palais De Tokyo for Gaillard’s 2022 exhibition “HUMPTY / DUMPTY.” During World War I, when a German bombardment set fire to the wooden scaffolding around the cathedral, lead from the building’s roof flowed down the gutters, solidifying as it cascaded from the mouths of the gargoyles. Gaillard presented the gargoyles as ready-made historical ghosts, but the act of exhibition was one of revelation, not endorsement. He claims authorship only for this revealing of the object rather than the object itself. Like Lützelburger transcribing Holbein’s drawings into woodblock carvings, the artifacts that Gaillard turns his attention to experience a translation, but only in reverence of the original and their histories. The work’s title — Gargoyles vomiting lead, 1873 1914 (2022) — offers their exhibition in “HUMPTY / DUMPTY” as a footnote in their lives (following 1873: the year the gargoyles were carved and installed, and 1914: the year of the fire that froze them in time). When the exhibition closed, they returned to Reims cathedral where they have the most value as part of the cathedral’s biography. In the world of the living, ownership is the gatekeeper of knowledge; it’s the dissemination of knowledge that gives it power. When the exhibition ends, many of Gaillard’s works are held only in collective memory.
History’s detritus fuels Gaillard’s work, but he does not record as an archeologist might: clinically and without bias. His processes of archiving and documenting are intensely personal. The objects he lenses are chosen according to a subjective curiosity, guided as much by poetics as by historical significance. He grants himself permission not to fixate, instead flitting through time, geography and culture, pausing only when intuition says stop. Fossil marble in the Saint Petersburg Metro station, flocks of nesting parakeets in Düsseldorf, portraits carved into palm trees in Chandigarh, vitrified asbestos waste from the Palais de la Découverte in Paris. The artist’s frenetic eye might seem chaotic but when compiled collectively — as an exhibition, a moving image, a collage — the reason begins to rhyme. Gaillard inserts his works into his own museum of realities as one might a sticker in a Panini album. As more are collected, a narrative begins to emerge but, for Gaillard, the end of the tale is an impossibility; there will always be another rabbit hole to follow. Some might expect respite from the frenzy of the outside world when we step over the threshold of a museum or gallery, but Gaillard doesn’t quite give us such reprieve. He longs for coexistence between the gallery and the world outside and every show is made towards that wholeness, but for the work to reflect our realities it cannot also provide a calming intermission in life. They still maintain the sensory overwhelm of the exterior, the great outdoors.
Much like a painter might paint en plein air, Gaillard’s output across mediums is birthed on site. One of my favorites of Gaillard’s works, The Land of Cockaigne (2020), follows Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s 1567 painting of the same name. The work by the Dutch master depicts three men sleeping off the effects of over-indulgent gluttony and was translated by Gaillard as an etching onto the cubicle of a Berghain toilet. The etching is an extension of the site, only possible to experience as a clubgoer likely feeling the effects of their own overconsumption. The Land of Cockaigne is a work that can’t be photographed and thus exists only in the memories of the lucky few who find it, intertwined with the stench of the club’s toilet and the low pitched resonance of bass.
On a cold afternoon in November, I traversed the platforms of Hamburg’s Jungfernstieg metro station, following a trail of Gaillard’s crumbs to finally discover the artifact I’d been told about: an incongruous pillar carved with seven women, dressed according to the fashions of each of the seven centuries the timber had lived. During the construction of the station in 1932, workers unearthed several wooden piles belonging to the Alster Mühlendamm dam built in 1250. Professor Richard Luksch at Kunstgewerbeschule carved the women into the pillar as a gift to the city of Hamburg. The pillar on Gaillard’s Hamburg “must see” list now lives in a subterranean home sandwiched between the tiled chequerboard floor and the mirror-finish steel ceiling of the U1 line’s platform, invisible to Hamburg’s commuters. It’s exactly these overlooked histories that Gaillard propagates through his work. The walls do talk; we just need to listen closer.
