Arthur Aillaud — La Forest Divonne Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 22 → October 29, 2016

“His painting is neither narrative nor illustrative, it really shows how interpretation is totally up to the viewer who will invest it with its own vision… There is an attractive interrogation that makes his work timeless, universal and inexhaustible.”

Claude Lorent, Critique d’Art

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Arthur Aillaud, Sans titre, 2016 Oil on canvas — 190 × 300 cm — one piece Galerie La Forest Divonne

Born in 1973, Arthur Aillaud works with Galerie La Forest Divonne since 2006. This is his 4th solo exhibition in Paris. 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.

Arthur Aillaud, Sans titre, 2016 Oil on canvas — 190 × 300 cm — one piece Galerie La Forest Divonne

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.

Arthur Aillaud, Sans titre, 2016 Oil on canvas — 190 × 300 cm — one piece Galerie La Forest Divonne