The first and, to my knowledge, only time Cyprien Gaillard ever drew something, it was a finger drawing in the white ammonium phosphate, ammonium sulfate, and magnesium silicate covering my living room floor of a man and woman having sex. The powder had come from a fire extinguisher he had released on my balcony at five in the morning, after a late night at Wolf’s, a seedy bar run by a German queen who must have arrived via Gare de l’Est some 20-odd years ago and set up shop. Given Cyprien’s promiscuity, the subject matter was not remarkable, but the circumstances were. It was the first time he had used the unlikely medium – the fire extinguisher – that would feature throughout later pieces, and the only time ever the tables were turned and I had ended up with the girl, and him alone on the couch.

The stunning view outside my balcony the following morning helped, as much as possible, appease my cheap champagne hangover: the trees across the street, lining the Canal St. Martin, were white, as if someone had climbed each tree and single-handedly painted each and every leaf, with the delicacy of a Chinese watercolor. I looked down at the parquet in the living room, and despite my difficulty breathing (a little known fact: without fires, extinguishers extinguish people) I found some solace in the small miracle that the smoke from the fire extinguisher had at least moved outwards as much as it had inwards. That night’s activities became a template of sorts for the summer of 2003. The venues changed but the elements – a fire extinguisher, a girl (henceforth, his), and lots of alcohol – made for numerous corners of Paris being painted white.

Have you ever befriended your antithesis? Not to be confused with nemesis, Cyprien – my antithesis – is intuitive where I am analytical, brilliantly autistic where I am excessively discursive, a slut where I am a prude. We often hear that opposites attract but if so, then surely in love, not in friendship. 2pac famously sang, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer,” but he said nothing of one’s antithesis. It took me 26 years to realize that just as universities and firms have quotas for minorities, individuals should have quotas for antitheses.

Throughout the course of a year, Cyprien and I had acted as guerilla suppliers of artist T-shirts outside every major art fair and biennale. “Go east,” I would tell him late at night in dingy Travelodge Miami motel rooms or in the Basel bushes, hidden, observing our illegal immigrants-for-hire peddle T-shirts of Cindy Sherman, Jeff Wall, and Maurizio Cattelan. I was trying to counter Cyprien’s inherent Americanophilia – he was born the year Reagan became president and lived the first six years of his life in California – with a healthy dose of Slavophilia. I knew the brutalism of Eastern Europe would speak volumes to the boy who grew up skating, tagging, and of late, unleashing fire extinguishers at people’s

stuffy parties on the Left Bank, literally raining on their parades with toxic white smoke.

When I visited him at the end of his one year stint at ECAL in Lausanne, he took me on an excursion to Lignon, a sleepy Swiss village where a spotless 1970s high-rise juts out of the hills and towers over a heavily forested area with a river. The forced exile into the Swiss landscape had caused him to distill the violence of vandalism and the urban environment into the transcendental delicacy of rural life.

He had spent a considerable amount of time grappling with the following question: how could the tower block feature in his work without it being yet another pretty picture, yet another sublimation, the likes of which were visible throughout contemporary culture, from the photography of the Düsseldorf School to the album covers of Detroit techno collective Underground Resistance? For Cyprien, it would play not just the lead role but exhibit Eddie Murphy-like range (not to mention obsession), acting as backdrop, supporting cast, and chorus in his etchings, films, and performances. Cyprien’s lust is autistic and just as he could not bear the passive side to libertines – the talk, the boasting, etc. – he could not stand the passive idea of an artist only representing the tower block and not engaging with it, going all the way with it, hitting a homerun with it, if you will.

His attempts at unearthing violence in nature are reminiscent of Werner Herzog’s. They both share a consumptive rage, but where Herzog sometimes gives the impression of a man raised by wolves, Gaillard is the resolutely urban counterpart: he was raised not by animals but by rioters. He is Romany in his blood if not in his form. His interest in vandalism and the utopian promise of tower blocks were early overtures to the devastating and romantic redemption of contemporary society’s ruins in later pieces like Desniansky Raion. When he did finally take a trip to Eastern Europe in the summer of 2005, he would leave the train station – whether in Chisinau or Kiev – and head straight to the Noviy Raiony, the “new regions”, where he gathered a taxonomy of residential high-rises whose mix of rigor and poetry would make Nabokov proud.

This past January, Cyprien made a trip to Toryglen, a working class suburb of Glasgow and site of the hit ad for the Sony Bravia flat-screen TV. The condemned building that served as the backdrop for Sony’s colorful explosions was due to be torn down and Cyprien had decided to be present at the demolition. As he prepared to document the fall of the tower, he could not help but feel that the demolition presented, in a different light, in different contexts, uncannily similar elements to his work, in abridged format. It was all there: the tower block, the explosions of color, the smoke, the demolition. The motley crew of former residents set up picnic tables and poured drinks at a safe distance from what used to be their home. One can’t help but wonder: is this a celebration or a mourning? Were these follies, or feats? The best genealogies are the unlikeliest and Cyprien’s is no exception. He has managed to draft, by sheer force, a convincing lineage between the fury of vandalism and the lull of landscape art in his work. Like the antimodern who celebrates the arrival of modernity despite shedding more than a couple crocodile tears for what preceded it, Gaillard’s work is equal parts triumphant and maudlin, reflecting on what has been before moving swiftly and merrily to what will be.