CURA.

Retinal Rivalry is a journey among the ruins of modernity, where the wreck is so mundane that a new sacred emerges. It’s uncanny, almost unexplainable and definitely unsettling. Employing 3D cinematography and high frame rate projection, Cyprien Gaillard’s latest video work, presented in his solo show curated by Samuele Piazza at OGR, unfolds as a non-linear tour of Germany where culturally significant public spaces and landscapes appear among less distinctive sites and details. A slow excursion of moving images lures the viewer to get transported and lost into a dérive of hallucinating tones, as immersive as a bad trip in which unperturbed surroundings give a glimpse of something off. Scenes of haunting public spaces — rendered so by the absence of any human presence in typically crowded sites, such as the grounds of Munich’s Oktoberfest — are combined with moments that evoke a tangible sense of time passing. From Roman ruins unearthed beneath the Cologne Cathedral’s parking lot, to a public fountain where a tissue clings limply to the foot of a bronze statue, stained with rust and limestone.

Gaillard is known for his long-standing exploration of what humanity leaves behind as it moves through history, whether obsolete tourist attractions, remnants of industrialisation, or ratty architectures. Here, monuments seem clumsy and forgotten, covered with graffiti or nestled among urban scaffolding. As the past gets stratified with contemporary urban reality, memory morphs into surreal sceneries of empty spectacles, where the romantic allure of ruins gives way to the mundane and the discarded. Emblematic in this sense is a scene featuring a Burger King inside a former electric substation for the Nazi rally grounds in Nuremberg, observed from a low rat-like perspective. Overall the human point of view dies out in favour of more objective gazes stripping even iconic landscapes like Bastei — famously immortalized by Caspar David Friedrich — of any romantic interpretation. As Retinal Rivalry unfolds, Gaillard’s camera shifts into a variety of unusual perspectives: the inside of a trash bin, the low gaze of scavenger animals or the aerial viewpoint of lonely drones.

Somehow a renewed sense of sacredness comes through. There is a scene half way through the video where an organ, also seen from an aerial perspective, plays a symphony by Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s a broken leg activating the holy soundtrack. White sock, hairy skin encased in a skeletal metal structure: it feels like a gothic cathedral of the now, bringing the spiritual down to earth just before collapsing into a ruin. A few minutes later the statue of Franco-Flemish Renaissance composer Orlande de Lassus in Munich is scanned slowly, showing how this has become a Michael Jackson memorial. Amid laminated posters, love inscriptions, candles, wilted flowers, and framed photos left by fans, the kitschiness of this improvised shrine verges on religious fervour. Between the I LOVE YOU and countless hearts, a certain oddness sinks in: it is all so terribly wrong. Uncontrollable and overwhelming as any other holy thing. The same highly technological medium employed could be thought of as cathartically immersive and, above all, ineffable by any attempt to capture the sculptural quality of the 3D images it depicts. By the end the head hurts as two images of a traditional statuette rotate before merging into one, adjusting the focus to find the perfect overlap: in a click the hyperrealist crispness of the image creeps into impossible reconciliations — it’s a retinal rivalry, the title suggests.