Gaillard & Claude — À propos — Slash Paris

Patrice Gaillard and Claude produce postures, a term rarely used in sculpture but appropriate to them because their objects so clearly manifest a studied, maintained attitude.

The precision of the pose. Their attitude is all about ergonomics, in a subtle delegation to the economic model in order to achieve optimisation, another term that has become rare in art since we ceased to be modern.

If contemporary art objects often serve as logos, then Patrice Gaillard and Claude propose the option of the island or block, in that the combined elements seem to be part of a synthetic fragment. A collective autonomy, because they pursue a tendency towards the average: a tie will not be an already established model but a morphed version of what already exists. By means of this generic aesthetic, they use wefts and follow patterns in order to attain their favoured field in a lascivious association of tertiary languages. Immediately cold. Discrepancy at its finest.

“We think only in the flat.” Patrice Gaillard and Claude didn’t say this but Jacques Lacan did when uttering one of his island dictums during a seminar. The comparison is my own but that is the effect they create: set-ups in three mental dimensions, their works seem subconscious. In order to formalise, they come back to “entry points” borrowed from computer language, which implies that there is a system behind all this and that the choice is a calculated one, accessible to all.