The Legacy of Gilles Aillaud
The Centre Pompidou is devoting a retrospective to Gilles Aillaud, entitled Animal politique (October 4th, 2023— February 26th, 2024, curated by Didier Ottinger). Almost 20 years after the painter’s death, it highlights the relevance of a body of work that tirelessly questioned our relationship with living things. But the relevance of Aillaud’s painting is twofold. It has become a point of reference for younger generations, and not just amongst figurative painters. Annabelle Gugnon carried out an investigation. Also in this issue, Anne Bertrand reviews La Fosse (1967), one of the artist’s key works.
“Gilles Aillaud has long been a painter’s painter. I’m delighted that the general public will finally be able to discover his work thanks to this exhibition at the Centre Pompidou,” said Claire Chesnier (1). The latter artist, who was born in 1986, uses pigmentbased calligraphic ink to paint shafts of light in which flows and gravity, striations and luminous frequencies seek an alchemy to make the painting appear “like a dawn that naturally becomes visible.” When JeanCharles Vergne, the curator of the Beautés exhibition at the Frac Auvergne, exhibited her inks on paper next to an oil on canvas by Gilles Aillaud, La Fosse aux ours (1979), she was very touched, because “his painterly gesture allows the material to find its own current, its own expanse. This abandon is essential in my work too” (2).
SUBVERSIVE
She is far from being the only artist of the younger generation to have looked closely at Gilles Aillaud’s work. He was a beacon and even a haven for many of them, tempted by figuration in an art world that was very minimalist and conceptual at the time. “He encouraged me to persevere in my being. Thanks to him, I realised that it was possible to paint, that it was all right...” laughed Thomas Lévy-Lasne, who was born in 1980. Romain Bernini (b. 1979) said that during his studies, “when I had to get good grades, I did photography and video, but when I was going for what I wanted, I painted. I admired Aillaud’s brilliance. He painted like an animal that acts to hunt or move and performs only the essential gestures. And in my work, I like to talk about the margins, shamanism, animism and Gilles Aillaud was a painter of marginal things who got to the crux of the matter. That’s what I liked about his work.” Marc Desgrandchamps (b. 1960) discovered Gilles Aillaud’s work in his teens through reproductions, before seeing it in person in the late 1970s, when he was about 20 years old: “One of my first shocks was the painting Vietnam, la bataille du riz (1968). Of course, in the foreground there is the GI captured by a North Vietnamese fighter, but I remember being struck by the horizontal lines in the background, by this abstraction in a figurative painting. Gilles Aillaud’s painting is subversive in its pictoriality. It’s a body of work that has infused in me. Sometimes, unconsciously, I’m reminded of him through certain effects in my paintings.” Sereinement (2023), one of his recent oil paintings, bears witness to this.