Arthur Aillaud — À propos — Slash Paris

Born in 1973, Arthur Aillaud works with Galerie La Forest Divonne since 2006. Landscape is the main focus in his recent work consisting of paintings, drawings and collages. Mountains, valleys, cities… Arthur Aillaud’s landscapes are often overlaid by geometric figures radically hiding their depth of field as their convergence lines. Aillaud creates a constant back and forth between flatness of the canvas and depth of the landscape, creating a very upbeat dialogue within his paintings between nature and architecture, abstraction and figuration.

In some of his last landscape paintings, strange silhouettes appear the same way the geometric figures do thus absorbing light and hiding the horizon. In his aerial views sometimes monumental and more gestural, Aillaud portrays cities, in the shadowy, twinkling night, cities that are magmatic, sprawling but always held at a certain distance.

The whole body of work is bathed into an indefinable light that gives it its singular tone : is it dusk or dawn? Arthur Aillaud feeds this ambiguity between night and day, planarity and perspective, seductive figuration and rigourous geometric plane, keeping the different interpretations open, thus making it impossible to reduce his canvases, or his art to an unique vision.

• 1973 Born in Paris
• 1998 First exhibition in Brussels and Antwerp in Belgium
• 2004 First Opera set design, Museumsquartier, Vienna, Austria
• 2006 Beginning of the collaboration with Marie Helene de La Forest Divonne at Galerie Vieille du Temple

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Arthur Aillaud works regularly for the theatre and the opera, creating original sets : Journal d’un disparu, Leos Janacek, Museumsquartier, Vienna, 2004. Par Allegresse, Natalia Ginzburg, Théatre de la Madeleine, Paris 2009. Illusion, Marie Louise Bischofberger, Schauspielhaus, Dusseldorf, 2011