ZAC 40mcube
39-40 avenue Sergent Maginot
35000 Rennes

Patrice Gaillard and Claude design hybrid-looking compositions with various techniques and forms. Using familiar shapes that they distort and render abstract, they maintain a few identifiable elements such as a tie, a whiskey glass, or eyeglass pieces… Objects which, when grafted to the other unrelated elements, stand out and remind the spectator of an object or brand in their day-to-day lives. This also serves to give the pop-art like sculptures a utility that one can always look for, as well as a false semblance of decorativeness.

The most recent sculptures of Patrice Gaillard & Claude play off an impression of familiarity yet leave us anticipating the completion of the shapes and structures. These sculptures create a communal feeling, like a script read from forms and playful dialogical titles: Havane Arithmétique (2005), Bongo Bar Glossary, Symposium à Copenhague, Local whiskey bar union (2006)… While the forms used give a hint—even truncated—at the time period, their titles give geographic clues which make us think of social scenes close to cliché. More talkative than the works they name, these titles add a fictional dimension and create an unfinished story.

For the second monographic exhibit at 40mcube, Patrice Gaillard & Claude invest in a new exhibit space near the Castle called ZAC 40mcube (Contemporary Art Zone). In the same vein as their two previous works, Tokyo Grand Design (2004), an enlarged home cinema which retained its purpose as a form of media, and Shrink and Stretch (2004), a wall form somewhere between a sculpture and a means of communication, they enlarge their vision of sculpture into empty space. They also address the question of exhibit space and integrate into the work its own system of presentation while designing a contemporary concrete mosaïc of nervous, acute, unrepetitive geometric patterns. This mosaïc covers the entirety of the floor and relates the brute architecture to the objects and sculpture bases which hold up giant eyeglasses layes out like valuable basins. Optrium—a condensed version of the words “optic” and “atrium”—makes it necessary to ambulate among the sculptures to see it from different points of view. The installation seems to soften as one walks through, creating a unique situation and atmosphere; the experience of a fragile space.

Photo: Patrice Goasduff.