Cyprien Gaillard: UR

The winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize brings his ironic humor to the show at espace 351, Beaubourg.

The exhibition held by the young winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize at the Beaubourg espace 351 every autumn offers new faces on the contemporary French scene excellent visibility. More often familiar fames than emerging stars, next year will be the turn of Romania's Mircea Cantor. Cyprien Gaillard's current installation strives to avoid this fixed-appointment approach. As permeable and revelatory as litmus paper, his research reacts to and verifies the hold of an often destabilising approach, here face to face with a far more institutional audience for the first time.

Gaillard (b. 1980) moved to Berlin and applies a cynical irony to the Parisian exhibition that is immediately apparent in the stonework at its start. UR are the two letters engraved on a structure in two separate parts—black Tunisian marble and glass from the current demolition of the Forum des Halles. In the 1970s, the worksite and quarry were the set of a fine Marco Ferreri film, Don't Touch the White Woman!, that Gaillard appears to have forgotten, because the monumental and by no means innocuous appearance of the diptych plays on this concept of the return of the same destructive violence that lay behind the development of the urban fabric that, back then, did away with the city's most chaotic indoor market and also on how it represents itself to us today, echoing the heavy demolition work to reshape the city that has often taken on legendary dimensions—see both the great Haussmann works and cultural undertakings such as the Centre Pompidou.

Cyprien Gaillard, <i>UR, Underground Resistance and Urban Renewal,</i> 2011. Silkscreen on glass and black marble, 241 x 246.5 cm each. Courtesy of Galerie & Bugada Cargnel, Paris. — Cyprien Gaillard, *UR, Underground Resistance and Urban Renewal,* 2011. Silkscreen on glass and black marble, 241 x 246.5 cm each. Courtesy of Galerie & Bugada Cargnel, Paris.

Multiple possible interpretations and shifts in geography and meaning can be linked to the two letters at the start of the installation. From Underground Resistance, the legendary Detroit techno label, to urban renewal utopias, today the Sumerian city is not just an archaeological site but also home to an US-administration Iraq military base.

Cyprien Gaillard, <i>01–04. Geographical Analogies,</i> 2006-2011, mixed media, 65 x 48 x 10 cm (framed). © Cyprien Gaillard. Courtesy of Galerie & Bugada Cargnel, Paris/Sprüth Magers, Berlin and London/Laura Bartlett Gallery, London. — Cyprien Gaillard, *01–04. Geographical Analogies,* 2006-2011, mixed media, 65 x 48 x 10 cm (framed). © Cyprien Gaillard. Courtesy of Galerie & Bugada Cargnel, Paris/Sprüth Magers, Berlin and London/Laura Bartlett Gallery, London.

Cyprien Gaillard's clever manipulation of codes and geopolitical and cultural categories has earned him a solid reputation as a re-translator and shaper of the concept of ruin, incorporating them into site-specific installations and a growing number of operations, some cold, that produce the romanticism and radical results of works such as The Recovery of Discovery, a magnificent work and a splendid modern take on the pyramid form, executed this year with 72,000 Efes beer bottles brought from Turkey, arranged and drunk by the public at the KW in Berlin, almost as if it were the destruction of a fleeting and ephemeral twin copy of Pergamon in the former East sector, or the WWII bunker dug up in Holland in 2009 during an exhibition of his Beton Belvedere at the Stroom den Haag.

Describing himself as an artist of exteriors, he is both archivist and archaeologist, bringing beautiful things to those watching the chaotic spectacle of permanent violence that shapes contemporary life.

These are just simple reminders of his highly effective recent works. When Gaillard pushes the entropic poetic of American land artist Robert Smithson to the limits, echoing operations such as Hotel Palenque, his efforts inevitably work like a precision instrument. He emphasises the points of contact between his very 21st-century aesthetic and the object-residue of modern décor, allowing the obvious energy of the urban subcultures that permeate it to flow. Describing himself as an artist of exteriors, he is both archivist and archaeologist, bringing beautiful things to those watching the chaotic spectacle of permanent violence that shapes contemporary life. However, in his Parisian rewrite, the metal displays brought from Peru as precious settings for hubcaps are unconvincing. Gaillard sees them as fossils or residue emanating from our car-based civilisation.

The reassembly of his charming Geographical Analogies in Polaroids layered in diamond shapes and with an increasingly decorative air also loses force, a little like the works with exotic beer brands set against tourist souvenir-scenic backgrounds prepared for the central pavilion at the last Venice Biennale. So too, the fragment of a Sumerian stele lent by the Louvre to end the exhibition produces a strange sense of the inauthentic. If this is the desired effect, this work of demolishing visual stereotypes is certainly a success, otherwise this stroll past relics is at risk of turning into an innocent visit to a recently restored ruin.
Ivo Bonacorsi

Cyprien Gaillard UR
September 22nd 2011–January 9th 2012
Le Centre Georges Pompidou, Espace 315

Cyprien Gaillard: UR

The winner of the Marcel Duchamp Prize brings his ironic humor to the show at espace 351, Beaubourg.

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