On paper, you would hardly expect the painter and theater designer Gilles Aillaud (1928-2005), one of the representatives of the Nouvelle Figuration movement, to be linked with Jürg Kreienbühl (1932-2007), a man trained in ornithology in Switzerland who lived in the shanty towns around Paris in the wake of World War II. But that is what Stéphane Corréard has very successfully and charmingly done as guest curator at the Gabrielle Maubrie gallery.
Aillaud, whose work featured in the group show Deadline at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2010, has just had a retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-arts in Rennes. It would be nice to see him get a proper retrospective in Paris, too. Last year, Dix291, a space created in Paris (11th arrondissement) by the artists Bernard Crespin and Myriam Bucquoit, brought to light the unjustly ignored Kreienbühl.
Although they never met, the two artists do have much in common, more in spirit than in form. True, they both made drawings, prints and paintings of the cages in the Jardin des Plantes zoo, Paris (Kreienbühl even got locked in overnight, it is said), and the drawings feature in the superb first room of this show, Quelques êtres vivants dans leurs environnements quotidiens (A few living beings in their everyday environments). But the closeness of these two painters doesn't have to do only with their subjects. Aillaud's zoo scenes, and the solitude and confinement of his caged animals, are echoed in mood by Kreienbühl's winds-wept waste grounds, their Gypsy, Algerian or Portuguese inhabitants standing outside their caravans, staring into nowhere, their eyes full of their distant past. There is the same, earth-clogged atmosphere, and blue tones frequently suggest dreams and the impossible hope of escape. These paintings show great restraint and respect for their subjects: from zoo to "zone." By a neat twist, one of Kreienbühl's lithographs, showing one of his typical piles of detritus and rubble, affords a glimpse of the "Cloud Towers" built at Nan-terre by none other than Emile Aillaud, Gilles' father. The work of both Aillaud and Kreienbühl seems particularly relevant today, given the interest of so many artists in the expressivity and mystery of the animal world, and also in the same kind of deserted zones threated with destruction.
