THE LIVES OF ANIMALS (2024)

IN MAY 1967, the French painter Gilles Aillaud showed a selection of recent works at the Galleria Il Fante di Spade, in Rome. Of the eight reproduced in the accompanying catalogue, all present animals inside various enclosures: crocodiles corralled into side-by-side pens; tapirs nosing a concrete dais; snakes coiled and stretched out in cells. As is typical of the artist’s zoo paintings generally, none include human figures. In his fascinating but forgotten preface, “Aillaud: Figurazione e naturalismo” (Aillaud: Figuration and Naturalism), the Italian critic Vitaliano Corbi suggested that precisely by excluding human actors from his representations, Aillaud draws the beholder into an acutely charged relationship with our animal others:

The presence of man is felt in the gaze that scrutinizes and meticulously insinuates itself into the scene, recovering details of singular evidence. Man, not figured within the scene, in fact polarizes the scene through his gaze. Yet assuming the part of the observer does not generate restful security. On the contrary, the more the gaze upon the “other” appears lucid and pitiless, the more it is accompanied by a feeling of ambiguity and restlessness. A man who becomes the object of his own vision alienates himself, but at the same time defines himself and acquires certainty of himself, being among beings: Here, on the contrary, the relationship with the world, not objectifying itself, is experienced [literally, “lived”: vissuto] as a precarious and elusive relationship.¹

Corbi’s objective is twofold. First and foremost, he wants to cleanly separate Aillaud’s tableaux of confined animals from the “naturalism” of Pop art (he leaves the term in English in the text). Whereas Pop, in Corbi’s telling, abdicates the responsibility of organizing form in favor of the blunt presentation of objects, Aillaud’s paintings are suffused with human intentionality. Drawing us into a “precarious and elusive relationship” with the things seen, they dissolve our subjective moorings. Second, Corbi is determined to sweep aside essentially allegorical understandings of Aillaud’s paintings as displaced portraits of human beings, what he calls the “as the captive animal . . . so is man” school of reading.² Such interpretations effectively block the experience he seeks to foreground, warding off the strangeness of the pictorial encounter with imported meanings (ones that, we might now add, remain wholly anthropocentric). Far more difficult, Corbi suggests, is to take these pictures as they appear, dispossessed of our usual certainties about how we stand toward the world and the nonhuman animals with whom we share it. The phenomenological drift of his argument reads as deeply attuned to the painter’s own emphases: Aillaud had trained in philosophy in the late 1940s with Jean Beaufret, then the foremost Heideggerean in France, and greatly admired the writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

More than half a century after the Rome presentation, Aillaud’s zoo paintings are at the center of an important survey at the Centre Pompidou. Titled “Gilles Aillaud: Animal politique” (Political Animal), the exhibition is brilliantly curated by Didier Ottinger with Marie Sarré and beautifully installed in a remarkable scenography by Pauline Phelouzat. Comprising thirty-seven paintings in oil on canvas from the years 1964 to 2000 alongside a generous selection of the artist’s graphic work, the exhibition takes a particular interest in the concurrence of Aillaud’s systematic adoption of the zoo theme and his assumption of an organizing role at the politically engaged Salon de la Jeune Peinture. Framing Aillaud as an ecocritical painter avant la lettre, it likens his searching depictions of confined animals to the roughly contemporaneous interrogations of apparatuses of control and forms of spectacle carried out by his generational peers Michel Foucault and Guy Debord. The key reference here is Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), published in 1975, and its famous pages on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon—the emblematic expression, Foucault proposes, of a visual regime of centralized power first instantiated by the Ménagerie royale designed by Louis Le Vau for Louis XIV at Versailles.These are notably different discursive emphases from those in play in the Corbi preface. Yet the show itself makes a powerful case for the continued pertinence of the Italian critic’s reflections, revealing the profound alterity at the heart of Aillaud’s depictions of animal life.

LAID OUT in the Pompidou’s Gallery 3, the exhibition loops upon itself, with visitors entering and exiting through the same passage. The procession of zoo paintings—the preponderance of the show—largely eschews chronology, a decision in keeping with their apparent lack of developmental logic. Two related yet distinct bodies of late work are nested within the procession: Lithographs drawn from Aillaud’s multivolume Encyclopédie de tous les animaux, y compris les minéraux (Encyclopedia of All Animals, Including Minerals), 1988–2000, appear in an essentially freestanding gallery midway through the show, while his chronologically overlapping paintings of free animals in Kenya from the late ’80s and early ’90s are gathered in a second, culminating room near the beginning (or end) of the loop. Importantly, however, the boundaries between zones are decidedly porous. As one moves through the show, strategically placed thresholds and vertical cutaways in the walls draw the gaze into and through adjoining spaces. Other paintings appear and disappear at various depths of field, rearticulating our sense of the works immediately before us.

Two particularly compelling juxtapositions occur at junctures where paintings of non-captive animals suddenly appear at once amid and beyond the zoo paintings, thereby throwing into relief core differences between these rhetorically disparate bodies of work. The first occurs just past the threshold leading to the gallery of Kenyan paintings, where visitors following the intended itinerary encounter an alcove containing the largest and most imposing tableau in the show, Piscine vide (Empty Pool), 1974. Measuring over nine feet tall by more than eleven feet wide, the painting engulfs visitors within a panoramic portrayal of a drained enclosure, its white tiles marred with unappealing stains; one German-language sign in Fraktur lettering implores visitors not to throw things in the now-absent water (BITTE NICHTES IN WASSER WERFEN!), while a second identifies the exhibited animal as a hippopotamus native to Africa (the origin is surely not incidental). Displaced to a barred pen atop a set of steps, the specimen in question appears as an inert heap of spotted flesh, slumbering—one assumes—among scattered piles of its own excrement.

Immediately to the left of Piscine vide, meanwhile, a cutaway segment in the same wall offers the beholder standing at a normal viewing distance from the painting an oblique glimpse of Girafes (Giraffes), 1989. There, the two nearly transparent ruminants, each a fugitive concatenation of colored patches, merge with a similarly stenographic landscape. The Kenyan painting’s high-keyed hues and exuberant handling underscore the clinical palette and firmly delineated contours of Piscine vide, effectively contrasting the indigenous animals’ participation in their Umwelt with the extreme reification of animal life in the modern zoo. In the latter, Aillaud makes clear, even the flora—for example, the leafy scrim in the upper left of Piscine vide—is kept within bounds and largely out of reach of the nonhuman residents.

Further within the exhibition, on the opposite side of the Kenya gallery, another temporally layered constellation drives home the violence of sequestration. Here, visitors making their way among the zoo paintings come upon Python et tuyau (Python and Tube), 1970. Installed on an individual segment of wall, with vertical slits to either side, the mid-format canvas is one of a handful of works in the show, all from the ’70s, whose titles imply parity between confined animals and inanimate things. In this instance, the vertical stacking of the eponymous elements establishes a clear visual rhyme—the snake, of which we see but a segment of a single coil, appearing even more object-like by association with the clamped and hinged conduit, even as the tube seems eerily vivified in turn. At first, it’s tempting to compare the picture to two other paintings installed nearby, both of which similarly feature plumbing fixtures: Tuyau et porcs-épics (Tube and Porcupines), 1976, with its crouching, huddled bit of pipe, and Otarie et jet d’eau (Sea Lion and Spray of Water), 1971, with its gushing spigot. The purposive industrial forms all but upstage the seemingly aimless animals.

Yet the cutaways to the immediately adjacent space also frame views of at least two pictures from the Kenyan period: to the left, Eléphant après la pluie (Elephant After the Rain), 1991; to the right, Les oiseaux du lac Nakuru (The Birds of Nakuru Lake), 1990. As is Python et tuyau, both pictures are clearly divided into roughly equal upper and lower halves—here by a distant horizon, there by a pinkish band composed of seemingly hundreds, if not thousands, of flamingoes. The wide-angle extension of Les oiseaux du lac Nakuru contrasts sharply with the tightly cropped and rigidly compartmentalized verticality of Python et tuyau, just as the teeming avian multitude throws into even starker relief the snake’s solitary confinement. Like the animals they depict, the chronologically later pictures appear at a distance—a promise of freedom held in reserve.

Crucially, however, this contrapuntal play reverses itself with one’s passage into the final gallery. Now it is the paintings of captive animals that appear in the interstices among portrayals of their free counterparts. From one especially poignant perspective, Grille et grillage (Grid and Grating), 1971, installed at the far end of the exhibition, slides into view alongside Girafes. A scrupulous large-format depiction of an empty cage, the earlier painting recalls an intractable reality. However harmonious the representations of animals in wildlife reserves, the zoos remain.

NOWHERE IS THE SEPARATION enforced by the zoo dramatized more effectively than in the six staggered niches—three on one side, three on the other—carved out by a single structure of movable walls alongside the gallery’s southwest ground-level facade (and therefore visible from the street). Each niche contains a single large-format painting—all are between six and six and a half feet tall and a little over eight feet wide—and a bench. In all six paintings, the enclosures are particularly prominent, and in four, barriers of various sorts come directly between the beholder and the depicted animal. A grille, seemingly flush with the picture plane, spans the width of Cage aux lions (Cage with Lions), 1967; a fence does the same in Intérieur et hippopotame (Interior and Hippopotamus), 1970; rows of spikes run the length of a narrow ledge in Eléphants et clous (Elephants and Nails), 1970; an abyssal chasm divides us from a lone lion in La fosse (The Pit), 1967. Yet in carving out space for the beholder within structures very like those depicted within the paintings—at once circ*mscribed and open to view—this stretch of the exhibition also makes visitors aware of their own exposure. Denying audiences the comfort of a detached viewpoint, the niches draw us into a more implicated relationship of exactly the sort described by Corbi in his 1967 preface.

The first impression, as the critic suggests, is of a lucid and pitiless examination. The animals in Aillaud’s paintings are never generic representatives of their species but instead register as relentlessly particular. Their physical singularity is manifest in the exacting descriptions of ribs within a flank; of sagging or folded flesh; of speckled and mottled skins. In Rhinocéros (Rhinoceros), 1979, the hide of the animal closest to us reveals an extraordinarily differentiated treatment, ranging from painterly strokes and more punctual touches to thinned-out drips and runs—just as the handling of another rhinoceros immediately to the left proves no less specific. Bodily attitudes play an important role: The hippopotamus seems almost to be crossing one hind leg behind the other; the elephant, cropped below the head, leans palpably to our right, one foreleg slightly bent. The trunk darkens halfway down; a toenail is discolored.

These are, to borrow Corbi’s language, details of singular evidence, plainly there for all to see. But precisely as indices of individuated animal lives, they also conjure something that does not show—not because it is hidden but because it is everywhere woven through appearance, something like its inner lining. Call it the invisibility of life itself, as revealed through flesh. Aillaud himself alluded to this quality in a 1981 interview with Jean Louis Schefer, describing the animal as at once “the most physical thing there is” and as immediately summoning “something that is the opposite, that is to say, really quite metaphysical.”³ Later in the same interview, the painter notes: “Invisible and visible go together. . . . What is invisible in something is not necessarily part of its manifestation. It is the part that, in what is manifested, protects and holds it back; that ensures that the thing is not completely delivered, like a commodity, to exploitation by the visible.”⁴

In many of Aillaud’s most compelling tableaux, this invisible reserve registers as a kind of mindedness. Nowhere do I feel this more strongly than before the painting in the sixth and final niche, Rhinocéros, 1972, depicting yet another individual from one of Aillaud’s most-painted species—in this case, gazing at a barrier or blind window, the bottom edge of which is spackled with an inscrutable bluish-purple substance. That the rhinoceros is looking so fixedly at an object—even, I am tempted to say, at a kind of painting—certainly contributes to the mindedness effect. No less important, however, is the way in which the animal’s attention is so clearly written in the body as a whole: from the visible sense organs of the head (eye, nostril, and swiveled ears, all trained on the screen and its unreadable stain) and the slope of the lowered neck to the firmly planted rear haunch. Indeed, the creases cuffing the ponderous head appear almost as tangible reverberations of that concentration, just as the shadow thrown by the lowered horn reads as its visual prolongation in space. The picture is not an invitation to psychologize; to the extent that projection is solicited here, it is a decidedly corporeal empathy. The effect is closer, perhaps, to an acknowledgment that there exist shapes of mind other than human knowing, each specific to a particular variety of embodied being.

AILLAUD’S ATTENTION to animal life is of a piece with his broader insistence on lived experience, what he and other leftist artists in his circle referred to as le vécu.⁵ His writings from the ’60s forward repeatedly take aim at strains of subjectivism that he suggests attempt to wall the individual off from the world. In perhaps his best-known tract, a vehement polemic against Marcel Duchamp, the painter presents the inventor of the readymade as but the latest in a long line of essentially Cartesian thinkers driven by a miserable and antiseptic humanism: “At the heart of this thought lies an unspoken resentment: This world where we die is chaos, in the face of which man is alone and must, to live, take everything into himself. In the face of this world, therefore, he strives to erect another one, sheltered from time, a human world, his ‘Oeuvre.’”⁶ The triumph of sheer authorial fiat over embodied painterly labor, the readymade figures here as a veritable denial of finitude and exposure—in short, all that human beings share with our nonhuman animal others. Tellingly, the next lines quote Duchamp’s assertion that art alone allows man to go “beyond the animal state, because art is an outlet towards regions which are not ruled by time and space.”⁷ Against this fundamentally idealist view, Aillaud closes by asserting his intention to act “in time and in space.”⁸

This emphasis on lived reality permeates the zoo paintings. Aillaud was adamant that he only painted things he had seen personally, and the pictures themselves often appear rooted in distinctly embodied vantages. In many instances, including Fourmiliers (Anteaters), 1967; Désert nocturne (Nocturnal Desert), 1972; and Trous dans la nuit (chiens de prairie) (Holes in the Night [Prairie Dogs]), 1976, the depicted edges of the enclosures are conspicuously oblique to the picture plane, thereby placing the beholder in a specific orientation relative to the scene. Often, we are looking down on the portrayed animals—whether from a normal standing height, as in Tuyau et porcs-épics and Otarie et jet d’eau, or from somewhat higher and farther away, as in Ours noir sur des pierres (Black Bear on Stones), 1981. Never, however, does the aspect indicate a detached, bird’s-eye view. We are always looking from somewhere in particular, bound in the problematic continuum of animal life.

Equally important is Aillaud’s refusal of rushing, single-point perspective. At times, he painted from photographs he had taken in zoos, deploying these documents as mnemonic devices akin to—if also, by his own accounting, less satisfactory than—sketches from life.⁹ (The Pompidou catalogue reproduces three of these; I would like to see more.) Yet he consistently adjusts the depicted spaces, refusing the distance imposed by the camera’s mechanical gaze to maintain the beholder in a situation of immediate physical proximity—a corporeal relationship also enabled by his frequent use of life-size or over-life-size scale. (He wanted, he once said, for the work to be right in viewers’ faces.¹⁰) Subtly binocular in effect, the paintings also reveal shifting areas of tighter and more relaxed focus (legs, in particular, are frequently elided or left unfinished, as are the two limbs farthest from the beholder in the 1972 Rhinocéros). And where the photographs are in black-and-white, Aillaud translates these sources into color, at times—by his own admission—selectively keying his palette up or down, as in the garish hues of Cage aux lions.¹¹ Attuned to what Aillaud once described as the “absurd and unnatural colors” of hot, humid enclosures of the sort frequently fabricated for animals of tropical origin, the gleaming blues and greens of the 1967 canvas draw us more fully into a multisensory experience in no way implied by the original photographic document.

And then, finally, there is the paint application, an aspect of Aillaud’s practice that does not come across well in reproduction. Although he scrupulously avoids virtuoso handling and minimizes the seductions of matter, opting for thinly applied paint and at times crude, unblended brushstrokes, Aillaud’s pictures are obviously handmade, evincing skips, errant brush bristles, and other traces of painterly labor. His deliberately unostentatious gestures stand as modest indices of a physical reckoning with things. They attest to what Merleau-Ponty once described as the painter’s act of “lending [their] body to the world,” wresting pictures from the “intertwining of vision and movement.”¹²

IF THERE IS ONE PAINTING at the Pompidou that exemplifies Aillaud’s insistence on a lived relationship to our animal others, it is the astonishing Rhinocéros de dos (Rhinoceros from Behind), 1966. The picture was included in the 1967 show in Rome and, I suspect, did much to shape Corbi’s understanding of the painter’s enterprise. Visitors in Paris come upon it when turning into the interior of the gallery after viewing the works in the three street-facing niches: One rounds the corner of the structure created by the movable walls and suddenly it is there—a massive rump that nearly breaks the picture plane, the right haunch a chaos of daubs and strokes in blues, grays, whites, and greenish browns. Rebarbative in theory, the subject proves wholly kinetic in its actual rendering. The animal, too, is turning a corner, or is on the verge of doing so. We are looking down on it, yet there is something Cézannesque in the way the powerful back rises to meet us, coming to an acephalous peak just below the painting’s upper edge. I do not quite say this rhinoceros is Aillaud’s Mont Sainte-Victoire, but we are not far off.

“Gilles Aillaud: Animal politique” (Political Animal) is on view at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, through February 26.

NOTES

1. Vitaliano Corbi, “Aillaud: Figurazione e naturalismo,” Gilles Aillaud (Rome: Galleria Il Fante di Spade, 1967), n.p. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Italian and French are my own.

2. Ibid.

3. Jean Louis Schefer and Gilles Aillaud, “Le Labyrinthe des apparences” (1981), reprinted in Gilles Aillaud, Pierre entourée de chutes. Ecrits et entretiens sur la peinture, la politique et le théâtre (1953–1998), ed. Clément Layet(Strasbourg, France: L’Atelier contemporain; Paris: Éditions Loevenbruck, 2022), 344.

4. Ibid., 345.

5. For more on the vécu and its relationship to the leftist critique of Duchamp in French painting of the ’60s and ’70s, with an emphasis on the work of Aillaud’s close friend Pierre Buraglio, please see my “Sharp Objects: The Art of Pierre Buraglio,” Artforum, October 2022: 160–67, 212.

6. Aillaud, “Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp” (1965), reprinted in Pierre entourée de chutes, 91.

7. Ibid, 91–92. The original quote, from Duchamp’s 1956 English-language interview with James Johnson Sweeney, appears in James Nelson, ed., Wisdom—Conversation with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day (New York: W. W. Norton, 1958), 99. The interview with Sweeney is available online as “Marcel Duchamp Interview on Art and Dada,” youtube.com/watch?v=Wuf_GHmjxLM; this remark begins at 27:54.

8. Aillaud, “Vivre et laisser mourir ou la fin tragique de Marcel Duchamp,” 93.

9. Aillaud discusses his use of photography in “La Photographie pourquoi” (1973), as told to Gérald Gassiot-Talabot, reprinted in Pierre entourée de chutes, 300–01. Here, tellingly, he describes the impossibility, for him, of working from found photographs: “I need to have seen the real thing for the photo to be of any use to me. I can’t use photos taken by others” (300). See also “Gilles Aillaud ou le réalisme critique” (1973), reprinted in ibid., 293–99, in which Aillaud, speaking with Jean Clair, explicitly distinguishes his painting from the Photorealist tendencies then beginning to be received in France under the banner of Hyperrealism.

10. Commenting on the specific example of a painting of an orangutan in a cage—possibly Orang-outang, 1967—Aillaud noted, “If I had respected scientific perspective, the spectator would have been thrown out way in front of the grate, whereas I wanted, on the contrary, for him to have his nose literally up against it” (ibid., 297).

11. Speaking to Suzanne Pagé on the occasion of his 1980 retrospective at the Musée de la Ville de Paris, Aillaud noted: “In the animal tableaux, many of the places represented are interiors—manufactured, constructed places. Their artificial and forced aspect is accompanied by absurd and unnatural colors. Many of these animals come from tropical places; one has therefore tried to recreate in these places a certain warm humidity that lends the light this glaucous aspect. The tableau is simply the reconstitution of this lethargic, drugged atmosphere” (“Le Proche et le lointain” [1980], reprinted in ibid., 327).

12. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind” (1961), reprinted in Galen A. Johnson, ed., The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, trans. Michael Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 123–24.