Gaillard & Claude

A critical and amused observer of the social imagination of our time, the duo of French artists Gaillard & Claude have cultivated, since their formation in the early 2000s, an art of absurd intrusion and poetic incident which would have transposed the burlesque and sound cinema from Jacques Tati to postmodern society, to reveal, behind our symptoms of "hangover", the contradictory injunctions. From plaster sculpture to polyurethane bas-relief, from marbled paper to textile printing, passing through electronic music or the staging of their own pieces, their polymorphous approach owes its coherence to the fact that its cultural referents are steeped in all in the same and unique "cultural magma" where the confusion of spaces reigns like the discordance of times. Extending the mathematical theory of sets to the field of aesthetics, Gaillard & Claude has thus become a master in the subtle art of double meaning and innuendo, of paradoxical affinities and incredible intersections, of scientific formulas and vernacular expressions. Envisaged as a first retrospective journey in Belgium since the installation of the duo in Brussels in 2008, the exhibition at MACS brings together the essential of their production through three bodies of work: Le Groupe et La Famille (2010), Orchestra (2015) and Baloney! (2020). Presented here is a bilingual French/English catalogue dedicated to the work produced by the French artist duo between 2010 and today, largely documented by a photographic report of all the pieces presented. Text in English and French.