latent_breath()

Galerie Eric Mouchet is pleased to present latent_breath_(), the fourth solo exhibition by French artist Pierre Gaignard and the first to be held in the gallery’s Brussels space.
 
Pierre Gaignard’s universe is both an intellectual and sensory adventure — a journey through art, technology, and poetry where each work becomes the extension of an ever-evolving inquiry. Through his practice, the artist questions matter, language, and memory — and, through them, our very way of perceiving the world. Entering Pierre’s studio means stepping into a parallel world, one in constant expansion. His capacity to invent seems boundless, born of an insatiable curiosity and a natural inclination toward research that drives him to question, deconstruct, and reinvent. Exploration, for him, becomes a fertile field of experimentation — where the genesis of one idea gives rise to another, continuously feeding a body of work that is infinite, fluid, and open-ended.
 
Our shared connection to Rome — my native city and his adopted one for many years — has no doubt strengthened our professional and personal bond. It was in Rome, in 2023, that he proposed, for an exhibition I entrusted to him, a singular work: an amaro made from plants collected along the Tiber River. A creation that perfectly embodied his approach: in his practice, gesture, process, and finished work belong to the same poetic essence.
 
All of Pierre Gaignard’s work explores the relationship between past and present through systems that blend craftsmanship, mechanical devices, and digital tools. Using artificial intelligence, he deconstructs and recomposes hidden forms, which he then reveals through light, sound, or matter — engaging both his own body and that of the viewer in the process. The titles of his works also play a fundamental role. They emerge from a rhythmic intuition, a musicality intrinsic to language. In Griza:j Hypermat’, the title’s pulse is defined by its phonetics; in latent_breath_(), the punctuation is inspired by Python code, symbolically marking the beginning of a new creative cycle. For him, language is a territory of experimentation — one whose evolution, syntax, and punctuation he probes and diverts until they acquire a plastic and sonic dimension.
 
In Griza:j Hypermat’, the artist draws inspiration from lithophany, a nineteenth-century technique consisting in molding images in translucent porcelain, visible only when backlit. Pierre Gaignard offers a contemporary reinterpretation through 3D printing, transforming industrial neon covers into sculpted surfaces. Between disappearance and persistence, the hybrid images he creates — derived from AI-generated models of historical botanical forms — evoke grotesque decorations, a theme I have also had the pleasure of exploring alongside him. These images, at once fragile and powerful, become figures of knowledge — dialectical images in the Benjaminian sense — capturing the tension between past and present, between memory and invention, where a single detail suddenly illuminates a new reading of reality.
 
latent_breath_() — the eponymous work of the exhibition — extends this line of research. Images generated by artificial intelligence for a fleeting instant are seized by the artist before vanishing, fixed within the material of the lithophany and revealed through a luminous device reminiscent of a negatoscope. These ephemeral images, made visible through the artist’s intuition and gesture, recall, in Georges Didi-Huberman’s words about Rodin’s casts, that: “It is no longer the substitute for an absent referent, but a substituting movement, a figural labor of substitution that continually engenders itself.”[1]
 
Similarly, Bestiaire Paramétrique, developed during a recent residency in the United States, explores stylized forms of a hybrid fauna, 3D printed and hand-painted. These creatures — both fragile and invented — express the tension between the disappearance of the living and the overabundance of its images in consumer societies. With an almost animist, even shamanic approach, Pierre Gaignard breathes life into these totemic sculptures, reconciling nature and culture, the visible and the invisible.
 
Between research, experimentation, and low tech, Pierre Gaignard’s works transform existing materials into objects of thought and poetry. They open up a space where aesthetics meet memory, where technology becomes a sensitive matter, where light illuminates not only form but also the gaze we cast upon the world.
 
Isabella Vitale
 
[1] Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact. Essai sur l’art, la mémoire et l’oubli, Minuit, Paris, 2008, p. 45
 
MORE INFORMATIONS:
 
// Pierre Gaignard
// Press kit
// latent_breath() (13/11/25-10/01/26 | Brussels)