Cyprien Gaillard - Geographical Analogies - 2010

This imposing artist's book, whose graphic design was created by Ludovic Balland in close collaboration with Cyprien Gaillard, is based on the artist's eponymous project, a collection of 900 Polaroids meticulously arranged in series across about a hundred vitrines, which tell as many stories on the themes of modernist architecture and entropic landscapes, architectural utopias, decline and destruction.
Cyprien Gaillard crisscrosses peri-urban residential or industrial zones in search of modern buildings threatened with demolition; one of these projects is, moreover, to bring them together someday in one place to create a park of ruins. Since 2006, he has produced series of Polaroids entitled Geographical Analogies that address the question of entropic landscapes by illustrating places marked by the processes of erosion and decay. Pinned like butterflies under a display case, the photographs are meticulously arranged in sets of nine according to a principle of visual correspondence between the depicted elements and, thus, between cultural fields that appear distant, such as art history, geopolitics, the youth culture, etc.
Limited edition.
The photographic, cinematic, graphic, and pictorial body of work by Cyprien Gaillard (born 1980 in Paris, living and working in Berlin) draws its source from observing the rural and urban landscape and from exploring the relationships between nature and architecture. Developing a very personal form of Land art, the artist pursues research on the traces left by humans in nature. His modus operandi and the works he creates are characterized by transgressing legal or moral rules. At the same time, references to the thinking of American artist Robert Smithson, who died in 1973, and particularly to his approach to the notion of entropy, are numerous. Like him, Cyprien Gaillard first worked on suburban sites before turning to classic, even idyllic, countryside landscapes.
Graduated from ECAL, Cyprien Gaillard has notably exhibited solo at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, at Stroom in The Hague, at the Santa Maria della Scala museum in Siena, and at the Hayward Gallery in London. He participated in the 5th Berlin Biennale, the 9th Lyon Biennale, and the 1st Athens Biennale. He received the Audi Talent Awards in 2007, the Les David in 2008, and the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2010.