Cyprien Gaillard
The New Picturesque (Johnstone Castle), 2008
Oil, acrylic and varnish on canvas
117.2 x 153 cm
The Picturesque emerged as a trend in the 18th century, to denote landscapes ‘worthy of a picture’. At the time, the most picturesque gardens and paintings were rough, irregular and rugged, trying to capture the wildness of nature in a contained form. Gaillard questions the notion of this representation with his The New Picturesque series, where he disrupted the canvas of genuine 18th and 19th century landscape paintings by covering almost all decorative details with white paint.
Gaillard is interested in the wreckage of modernity and humans’ obsessive meddling with nature. He echoes 18th century thinker and art critic Denis Diderot’s philosophy that ‘it is necessary to ruin a palace to make it an object of interest’ (in ‘Salon de 1767’, 1767). By hiding certain elements from view the ‘essence’ of the picturesque and the beauty of nature when left to its own devices, is revealed.