As Paris prepares for the 2024 Olympic Games by repainting the Eiffel Tower and ‘re-enchanting’ the Champs-Elysées, so French artist Cyprien Gaillard has also been busy thinking about our perpetual battle for preservation, and how this transitional moment is fertile ground for unpredictability, chaos and disorder.
Paris’ neo-Renaissance is at the heart of Gaillard’s major two-part show ‘Humpty \ Dumpty’, simultaneously exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo (‘Humpty’) and Lafayette Anticipations (‘Dumpty’). ‘But this Renaissance is not all-encompassing. Not everyone makes the cut,’ Gaillard explains via Zoom from his Berlin studio. By everyone, Gaillard is referring to buildings and monuments overlooked during Paris’ facelift. ‘The politics of renovation in Paris have their limits and obstacles,’ he says.
Born in Paris in 1980, Gaillard has lived and worked in Berlin, on and off, for the last decade. Though voluble and eloquent, he comes across as private and somewhat enigmatic. ‘I’ve never had
