Meditate with Gilles Aillaud (1928-2005)

Meditate with Gilles Aillaud (1928-2005)

THE CONSTRUCTION of this painting, in a realistic style, intersects large horizontal bands of gray, beige, white and brown with the vertical imposition of gray and green masses. Then the mind does its work as an observer to reconstruct the scene, mentally widening the frame. The masses and lines then emerge from abstraction and take on meaning: the massive lower body of an elephant, busy picking up its food placed on the light concrete of its sad cell, faces us. The strange framing is deliberate, highlighting the white band, garnished with small sharp points, which marks a border of exclusion between his world and ours. Fascinated by what traditional zoological parks reveal about our humanity, the French painter Gilles Aillaud, who is also a theater decorator, set out to show this painful border. In this prison model which attempts to contain the wild part of the world to show it to us without risk, the universes overlap without meeting. Nature is emptied of the bonds that form its basis. Existence is stored in a glass case. And animals are no longer just representatives of cataloged species. The plant, the animal and the mineral are reduced to categories which paint a gloomy scene. There remains this wrinkled trunk which swings in front of us, as if to tell another story. The one that resists and that makes us living beings sharing not cells, but one and the same common home.

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