Jacqueline Bilheran Gaillard
Born in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, South-West of France.
Lives and works in Soultzmatt, East of France.
Former student in the Ecole Normale Supérieure, a graduate of philosophy, she began painting, then used photography a lot. Her current work consists in paintings (mixed media) and sculpture-assemblies.
The paintings mix photographic report and oil and/or acrylic painting, the sculptures are assemblages of materials and various objects, metal, cardboard, fabrics, plastic, collages, painting and resin.
Jacqueline Bilheran Gaillard works by series for her paintings as for her sculptures, which are linked either to an industry site or a theme, or to the privilege of a material.
Metamorphoses of discarded things
Jacqueline Bilheran-Gaillard's work is one of endless circulation between photography, painting and sculpture with all three art forms on an equal footing and a generous embrace of all types of materials, rusty metal, paper, plastic, textile, resin, to name a few. Despite this wide range of approaches, a strong thematic unity pervades the whole project: it is the poetry of the discarded thing, the beauty of objects that have lost their familiar use and suffer the wear and tear of time and distortion, the latter coming in two kinds: that resulting from chance location on the trash pile and the intentional variety obtained in the workshop of the demiurge artist who compresses, crushes, melts, tears, creases, assembles, deforms, colours, photographs, transfers and paints.
What could be more prosaic or short-lived than a garbage heap? Everything in it changes all the time. The arm of the power shovel or other crushing machinery will constantly disrupt its temporary organizations, burying them under every fresh layer of waste: hardly has the semblance of an order been glimpsed than it is no longer there. And it will be gone forever when the whole heap is gobbled up in the molten metal inside the recycling plant’s oven. But this temporary order existed. It was caught by the artist’s eye in a photograph, then went on to become a canvas; the creative gesture continued as some of the objects “picked from the dump” were turned into a sculpture. In the end, the trivial moment has been elevated through its transformation into an object whose permanence can match the infinity of time. By stamping a long-lasting value upon what was only temporary, art endows appearances with a higher level of reality: it pulls them out of evanescent and barely perceptible existence to idealize them and make them manifestations of the spirit. Metamorphosis as the process that turns the transience of a sensory appearance into eternity is what Jacqueline Bilheran-Gaillard’s work is all about.
Email: jacqueline.gaillard@wanadoo.fr
Website: http://www.bilheran-gaillard.com
