“Think of silence as a violence, when silence means being made a frozen sea.”¹ – writes American poet Chen Chen – “…the right silence can be an action, an axe right through the frozen sea”¹

 

Can silence have an agency? Can collapse and decay have a form? What do the ruins conceal? What is preserved on the fossilized surface of the past? What drifts in the space between the marks of exploitation and the abuse polluting the oceans? What is hidden under the surface of the water?

 

Cyprien Gaillard's first solo exhibition in Hungary takes viewers beneath the surface, where different materials and sensibilities collide, whether it be the concrete bottom of an artificial lake in the Parisian suburbs with painfully low water levels, the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, or Soviet metro stations deep underground. Gaillard brilliantly clashes different temporalities and geographical locations, elements of the built and natural environment, submerged histories and our daily lives, the living and the previously alive, shedding new light on our present through fragments of the past. His works embrace the beauty of gradual and inevitable decay. The artworks featured in the exhibition reflect rhythms of different materialites and contrasting times, blending fossil fuels with fossils of the past and of the future. The rhythm of resigned and violent parish oscillates, but in this rhythm, echoes of the future can also be heard. Or as the artists refers to this with a quote from Vladimir Nabokov;  “The future is but the obsolete in reverse.”²

 

Hold your ear to a shell, and you’ll hear the ocean. Hold your ear to a fossilized ammonite shell, and you’ll hear time.

 

Cyprien Gaillard works across a range of media including film, video, photography, collage, installation and live performance. The seductive audiovisual language of Gaillard’s films recalls the eighteenth and nineteenth-century Romantic aesthetic tradition of seeking the sublime in images of ruins, catastrophes and topographical extremes. Yet his works can also be read as socio-critical analyses of colonialism, of the failed social aspirations of modernist architecture and the fluid nature of capital in the age of tourism and gentrification. Or as a meditation on how quickly we forget that all societies will eventually perish, one civilization ineluctably yielding to another.

 

Cyprien Gaillard (*1980, Paris) lives and works in Berlin and Paris. Selected solo exhibitions include OGR, Turin (2024), Palais de Tokyo & Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2022), Fondation LUMA, Arles (2022), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2021), TANK Shanghai (2019), Accelerator Konsthall, Stockholm (2019), Museum Tinguely, Basel (2019), K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2016), Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2015), MoMA PS1, New York (2013), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013), Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2012), Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2012), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2011), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2011) and Kunsthalle Basel (2010). Significant group exhibitions include Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2024), Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles (2022), Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2021), Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2021), GAMeC, Bergamo (2021), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2020), 58th Venice Biennale (2019), Fondation Vincent van Gogh, Arles (2019), Cleveland Triennial (2018), Gropius Bau, Berlin (2018), Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2018), ARoS Triennial, Aarhus (2017), The Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing (2017), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2017), Hayward Gallery, London (2016), 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015), 54th Venice Biennale (2011), Gwangju Biennale (2010) and 5th Berlin Biennale (2008).