LEO CAILLARD

Leo Caillard is an artist that plays with our relationship with time. Using anachronism, the artist wants us to reflect about the present in light of our past.

INSPIRATION

Leo Caillard lives and works in Paris. He first fell for a grand passion towards science and observation. Yet, as he grew fascinated by the notion of time, he discovered the need for a conceptual and artistic response. He started studying at the Gobelins in 2006 and left to the USA shortly after to study the New York art scene. Personalities like Stephen Hawking really inspired him.

VISION

It’s when the artist returns from the USA that his art starts making sense : he starts activating our our social routine in visual coding contrasting the past and present times. More than a simple inspiration, it’s an artistic movement that he wishes to create. A movement which is here to challenge our notions of identity in a fast moving society so that we can make a lasting impact on the generations to come. The artist wants us to look into our past to design a more powerful future.

PAST PROJECTS

In 2009, he begins with a project reflecting on our use of digital visual coding in a museum setting. This project was derived from the fact that we see over 500 images per day (in comparison of 50 images back in 1960). The lifespam of a digital image is very short, a few hours barely on social media. He put this understanding of time in relation to the artworks in the museum who lasted a few centuries and called the series Art Game. Two years later, he creates his most pertinent work called Hispters in Stone where he dresses up classical sculptures so that we can better comprehend the difference of times between the two historical periods. Society changes but the great human questions remain and that’s this belief which guides the core essence of Leo Caillard’ works.

CURRENT PROJECTS

For the past two years, the work of Leo Caillard is more and more engaged with in museum context. In March 2018, the artist contributed to te exhibition Classical Now at King’s College London alongside reknown artists Marc Quinn and Damien Hirst. Leo dressed up two enormous sculptures at the north entrance of King’s College London. The artist is currently exhibiting in Paris in all the public spaces of Bercy as he used augmented reality to create imaginery sculptures appearing on a series of empty pedestals. Two new series called Light Stone and Wave Stone question our relationship with reality via a discourse between light and stone, presence and absence, the tangibility of marble and the immaterial digital.

FUTURE PROJECTS

Leo Caillard works currently on many different projects that question the same notions of time and identity but instead trying to make the installations more global, reaching wider demographics.
One of these projects is to create a series of notes, in partnership with a fiduciary group to obtain a powerful visual result. The aim is to challenge our notion of money and its core evolution in our society. The volumes of notes will be used in participative installations. They will highlight how ephemeral money can feel in contrast to more philosophical value systems. The audience will become an integral part of the project.