Gilles Aillaud - Escapes

The French Academy in Rome, directed by Richard Peduzzi, will organize a major exhibition dedicated to the work of Gilles Aillaud, to be held in the galleries of the Villa Medici from February 8 to April 10, 2007, with Philippe Dagen serving as the exhibition’s scientific advisor. The exhibition, which features a wide selection of the artist’s works drawn from prestigious public and private collections, aims to demonstrate how the concepts of confinement and openness represent one of the fundamental themes through which Gilles Aillaud’s artistic vision is expressed.

THE ARTIST AND HIS WORK

Gilles Aillaud was a painter and theater set designer; he was associated with productions by Klaus Michael Gruber, Jean Jourdheuil, and Luc Bondy, among others, in Germany and France. During his school years and until 1945, he painted one picture a day. Between 1946 and 1947, he studied philosophy. In 1949, he returned to painting. During the 1950s, he depicted birds and seascapes using paint and collage. In 1952, he held his first solo exhibition. During the 1970s, he painted animals confined in cages, enclosures, glass-roofed structures, or behind bars. Beginning in 1978, he painted seascapes. As a participant in the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, of which he became president in 1965, Gilles Aillaud created collaborative works with Eduardo Arroyo and Antonio Recalcati, such as “A Passion in the Desert” and “Live and Let Die, or The Tragic End of Marcel Duchamp.” His work was associated with “New Figuration” during the “Mythologies Quotidiennes” exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Born in 1928, he died on March 24, 2005, in Paris. This painter, above all an independent artist whose canvases protested against imprisonment and absurdity, became—following various travels—a renowned landscape artist known for his infinitely open spaces. A deliberately cool color palette and meticulous attention to perspective and composition keep the viewer emotionally at a distance from the subject, while physically integrating them into the space surrounding the object. “Since Aillaud is virtually the only artist to have taken on the zoological subject, there are no references or comparisons to draw upon. There is no school to which he belongs. No ‘foundational’ text to which he can claim affiliation. No critical authority on which it would be reassuring to rely. (…) Within each of these representations, a mechanism of self-destruction—or self-mockery—operates with unyielding obstinacy. These animals evoke the idea of primeval, unspoiled, wild nature. The places where they are found necessitate the presence of a human arrangement that, while providing the animals with relative comfort, makes it clear that they are in exile within confined spaces that bear only a very imperfect resemblance to those in which they should have lived. (…) Wouldn’t a painter who depicts animals that were once wild in their cages be using this metaphor to portray artists who ought to be furious within their enclosed spaces? False savagery, false anger. Hence Debord: “In the truly inverted world, the true is a moment of the false.” Philippe Dagen