Gilles Aillaud — Acquisitions récentes — Loevenbruck Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 27, 2023 → January 11, 2024

Exhibition of six paintings by Gilles Aillaud, ranging from “Boite de serpents” in 1967 to “Plage d’Hauteville” in 1990, as well as the graphic work “Paysage,” 1980.

Gilles Aillaud, not only a painter but also a poet, scenographer, and theater decorator, was initially part of a group of activist artists gathered at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, who would later be labeled as “Figuration narrative.”

Alongside artists like Arroyo and Recalcati, he co-authored a series of paintings symbolically representing the death of Marcel Duchamp, emphasizing their divergence from this heritage. However, Aillaud’s painting during the sixties and seventies focused exclusively on a theme: that of animals confined in zoo cages.

Using surprising framings that echoed the architectural devices of a reinvented artificial nature, and employing a cold and smooth technique, these works conveyed the voyeuristic fascination and underlying unease of these scenes of confinement. “When I depict animals always confined or ’displaced,’ I am not directly painting the human condition,” said Gilles Aillaud.

“Man is not in the cage in the form of the monkey, but the monkey has been put in the cage by man. It is the ambiguity of this relationship that preoccupies me, and the strangeness of the places where this silent and unpunished captivity takes place.” Later on, vast and luminous landscapes seen in Africa or Greece would constitute a second phase of his painted work, opening up to a liberated nature. ¹ The questions that our era poses about our relationship to the living highlight the importance of the long-awaited retrospective “Gilles Aillaud. Animal politique,” presented at the Centre Pompidou until February 26, 2024.

¹ Alfred Pacquement in Histoires naturelles. Un regard sur la scène française, Art Paris Art Fair, 2021.