"The images that paintings are interest us only in the relation they have to the whole of the historical reality in which they appear."
A French painter of the Narrative Figuration movement, Gilles Aillaud associates pictorial deconstruction with revolutionary activism. In his paintings, he constructs a complex system of perspective, trapping the viewer in falsely stabilized spaces. The bars and grids that Aillaud often uses are not a motif of "materialist" painting but a fetishized structure, a kind of modernist episteme, just as Rosalind Krauss made the grid the emblem of modernism, of the transition from cubism to minimalism. His paintings seize a fragile moment when the stillness of a setting comes alive with the sudden presence of a figure or beast. This moment is that of the emergence of the visible; the attention paid to the epiphany of the form is such that Aillaud's works never cease to question their completion, thus maintaining a deep kinship between Aillaud's art and Merleau-Ponty's genesis of the visible.