Cyprien Gaillard

by RL Cutler

Cyprien Gaillard’s most recent 3D video installation Nightlife (2015) is a riveting visual and auditory experience. Moved by gusts of wind, the elongated branches of Hollywood Juniper trees sway in slow motion, dancing ecstatically as though rejoicing in their emergence. Here, plant life vibrates, and nature has agency regardless of the human desire to domesticate and control. This focus on a botanical aliveness reflects Gaillard’s longstanding fascination with the geological and animate forces that inhabit our shared landscapes. His new film, installed on a huge screen at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, is a lively interpretation of this reality. Navigating complex subject matter through an aesthetic sensibility informed by contemporary technology, Romanticism and Land Art, the French-born, Berlin-based artist produces evocative, hallucinatory and disturbing perceptual experiences that alter our felt sense of time.

“Geographical Analogies” (2006-09) an early Polaroid series, offers an example of the artist’s ability to collapse time and space into an idiosyncratic visual syntax. Groups of nine Polaroids are assembled in diamond-shaped grids installed in an extended vitrine. Laid over a concave surface, the two-dimensional images assume a strange solidity and materiality that is reinforced by each successive association. Representing locations from around the globe and architectural features across time (obelisks, Gothic statues, high-rise buildings, etc.), the series offers a dreamy formalism of entropic structures. The effect is elusive, ambiguous and altogether satisfying as one takes in each constellation of disparate images unified by the investigation of ruined structures.

Speculating through remixed audio, slowed-down moving images, Polaroid photographs or denatured construction equipment, Gaillard tells seductive stories about architectural remnants, cultural monuments and failed utopias. In many works he demonstrates a fascination for erosion whether in archaic ruins or modernist buildings. An example of this alteration of space-time is his 2011 film projection Artefacts. Playing continuously on a 35mm projector installed in the exhibition space (I saw it at MoMA PS1 in Brooklyn), the work is a series of scenes that reflect upon the mythical Babylon and post-conflict Iraq as eternal cycles of growth and decay. Shot on the artist’s iPhone and transferred to 35mm format, the effect is that of a suspension between perceptual and psychic realms. What Gaillard does so well is to engage associative connections between past and present through historically tangible locations, even as they disappear before our eyes. Time takes on a physical presence and palpable energy that affects the viewer’s bodily sensations.

In Nightlife Gaillard offers a meditation on the agency of things, plants, sculptures and film itself as though they may tell us stories from their own viewpoints. This nonhuman perspective is manifest in the slowed-down 3D moving images accompanied by a sonic sample from Alton Ellis’s rocksteady classic Blackman’s Pride set on repeat. The endless, echoing refrain of the audio track, remixed using reverb and delay, coupled with subtle shifts in pacing and perspective, produce an out-of-body visual and auditory experience. The hovering camera work extends the sensorial experience of space and time by projecting the viewer into a netherworld of botanical energies, cascading fireworks and disembodied points of view. Beginning with a rotating tracking shot of Rodin’s The Thinker from the Cleveland Museum and followed by a mesmerizing and ecstatic dance of Hollywood Juniper trees, the seamless stream of consciousness breaks free of its urban habitation and, like the camera work, floats upward in defiance of human coordinates.

Here, the perspective initially captures fireworks from a conventional relative position; but before we know it, we are inside the pyrotechnics and become the very flashes of carbon, molecules and gunpowder. Residual smoke from the fireworks launched above the Berlin Olympiastadion, built under Hitler for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, echoes the swaying, dancing trees of the previous scene. The fascist architecture now the site for Pyronale, an annual international fireworks spectacle, has become the stage for what Walter Benjamin called a dialectical image where past and present interact with one another … The historical reference to National Socialism is further echoed in the final scene of an oak tree brightly lit by the beams of a helicopter’s searchlights.

During the 1936 Games, the Olympic committee gave each gold medalist an oak sapling, an ancient symbol for Germany. The Afro- American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals and received four oak saplings. The artificially lit tree in the final scene of Nightlife is one of the only known surviving Olympic oak saplings, planted by Owens at Rhodes High School in Cleveland. In this hallucinatory encounter, the past haunts the present.

Whether working with Polaroids, cellphone technology or 3D filmmaking, low-fidelity visuals act as a counterpoint to high-tech processes. The disjunction between past and present, analogue and digital, music and film create a strangely anachronistic encounter that is felt through the senses as much as the intellect. Gaillard pushes the limits of current and obsolete technological innovation as a way of exploring temporality and perception as we now experience them. The cinema apparatus is both the subject and the means through which the viewer travels through analogue and digital space-time.

The exploration of disjunctive time scales evokes an aesthetic lineage to artist Robert Smithson, whose own practice—itself concerned with entropy—shifts perception from the human to the geological. What Gaillard continues to achieve in his work is a foregrounding of the disappearance of lost worlds, the liveliness of objects and the correspondences between the distant past and our own historical moment.

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Randy Lee Cutler is a Vancouver-based writer, artist and educator. She contributes essays to catalogues and art magazines while maintaining an experimental relationship to pedagogy, gardening and embodiment. She is an associate professor at Emily Carr University in the Faculty of Visual Art + Material Practice.

This article was originally featured in BlackFlash Issue 33.1.