Fabien Gaillard

Fabien Gaillard, born in 1974 in Évreux, France, currently lives and works in Montpellier. His painting practice revolves around an exploration of material, memory,
and the relationship between the artist’s intervention and the inherent qualities of the
surface.
Wood plays a central role in his work. Whether using fine wood species or reclaimed timber marked by time, Gaillard selects each surface for its unique character. Grain, irregularities, tonal variations, and existing traces are never concealed; instead, they become integral to the composition, sometimes guiding the artist’s gesture itself.
Gaillard works primarily with fluid acrylics and pigments that penetrate the wood fibres rather than covering them. Through transparency, layering, and absorption, colour both reveals and transforms the structure of the wood. Painting appears to emerge from within the surface, creating a dialogue between pictorial matter and organic material.
His artistic universe is notably rooted in a poetics of the path, conceived as a space of passage and memory. This idea is echoed by the silent presence of megaliths and standing stones, whose monumentality and permanence inform his visual vocabulary.
Monolithic forms emerge within more fluid compositions, confronting the stability of stone with the movement of pigment and matter. Rather than simply representing reality, these mineral presences become essential, almost archaic forms, contrasting with the organic richness of the wood.
This encounter lies at the heart of Gaillard’s practice. Stone evokes permanence and a sense of time extending beyond the human scale, while wood carries the memory of the living world, its growth and its transformations.
Between these two temporalities, Gaillard seeks a state of balance: between mineral and vegetal, permanence and alteration, controlled gesture and the unpredictability of material. His works become territories of transition, where each surface retains traces of its own history.
Through this exploration, Fabien Gaillard develops a form of painting in which the support is never merely the surface upon which the work exists: it becomes one of its subjects. Wood, pigments, and mineral forms come together in a sensitive visual language shaped by reflections on time, traces, and the profound relationship between the living world and matter.