This autumn, Galerie Christophe Gaillard presents pieces by the American scenographer and plastic artist Bob Wilson (1941–2025) in Paris: nine drawings from Daniel Cordier’s collection are displayed in a unique dialogue with the iconic chair designed for Hamlet Machine in 1986, and two glass sculptures by Daniel Pommereulle (1937–2003).
“Light at first!” cried Bob Wilson in a 2021 radio interview during a run of several of his theatre productions at the Théâtre de la Ville and Opéra Bastille in Paris. “Light is the most important element of theatre,” continued the American scenographer as, “without light, there is no space1”. With fields and blocks of colour, the minimalist perfection of graphic lines, and rays of light that slice through the emptiness of the set, Bob Wilson’s work has shaped our contemporary imagination with his unique way of structuring light. More than a design element, light is central to his compositions; it structures and creates the space his actors’ bodies move into, strengthens their presence, and shapes the environments and the refined furniture he began designing in early 1970s.
Teenage Bob Wilson wanted to be painter. Born in 1941 in Texas, he died in July 2025 after a life spent drawing – a practice that informed his production design, and became a body of work in its own right, displayed since the start of his career in American and European galleries and museums.
After New York, Wilson found success in France in 1971, causing a stir with the avant-garde freedom of his piece Deafman Glance. Three years later, the Palais Galliera museum organised the very first museum exhibition of his pieces, featuring a selection of sculptures and drawings, while the opera A Letter for Queen Victoria was performed in La Rochelle, then Paris, before making it to Broadway.
It is likely around this time that Daniel Cordier acquired the remarkable set of nine drawings to be presented at Galerie Christophe Gaillard this autumn. Created between 1973 and 1974, and rediscovered among the huge variety of work in Cordier’s collection (acquired by Galerie Christophe Gaillard in 2022), these paper drawings are from the same period as Wilson’s pencil Air drawings shown at the Palais Galliera museum. A pioneering gallery owner and collector, Cordier recognised the liveliness and originality of the American plastic artist’s experimentations with space, time and light.
In ink, graphite or colour pencil, Wilson’s strokes intertwine and converge in rays of energy which cross and animate the expanse of blank page. The colour – or light – makes the space felt. While his theatre and opera design is known for the clarity of figures and an obvious desire for perfection, Wilson’s drawings reveal quick movements and the fluid depiction of moving shapes, his hand transcribing a wave or flow with running lines, paths, spirals, endless whirls, oscillations and rhythms, seeking to create tension, open the space and circulate the air.
This was the challenge faced by the painter, poet, filmmaker and sculptor Daniel Pommereulle (1937–2003) in his early glass sculptures. Known since the mid-1960s for his sharp objects and art inspired by the experience of limits, Pommereulle was continually seeking opportunities for break-in in his drawings, films and sculptures.
In 1989, he saw glass as the best means of achieving this. He began sculpting industrial glass, before moving on to so-called “atomic” glass, known for its very high lead content. Pommereulle used a hammer to break certain edges of smooth glass cubes, with the snags he created allowing him to work with the interplay of light, both inside and out. Atomic glass breaks with sharp and severe ridges. Pommereulle then assembled the blocks of glass using silicone glue. His atomic glass columns are empty and yet charged with energetic power. “I do not make objects. I produce images. These sculptures are traps where the energy of light flows2 ,” he explained. Combining them with drawings by the American scenographer, who also enjoyed creating glass sculptures in his collaborations with the CIRVA workshops in Marseille between 1994 and 2003, showcases the endless qualities of transparency.
In the early 1990s, Pommereulle embarked on an innovative new approach, adding hammered steel, tracing paper and porcelain to flat sheets of glass and blocks of atomic glass. Sharp edges still feature on certain glass cubes, but framed here by a metallic structure. The blocks are not only stacked and glued, but contained and packed. A number of sculptures resemble doors, all calling to be passed through, mentally with the gaze, and physically by the light. They are built in two parts, supported by a metallic structure revealing traces of solder and the framework of the materials.
Pommereulle assembled sculptor’s materials as well as – for the first time – drawing elements. He connected paper and glass, combined sculpture and drawing. He focused all of his attention on the interactions between transparent parts, inventing new plastic solutions. These sculptures require two time frames or two types of appraisal: one that sweeps over the expanses of glass and loses itself in the refraction of the light, and one that approaches the drawing as a point of departure for the imagination.
The artist draws on translucent tracing paper which he covers in motifs sketched in pencil or flecked with watercolours, using the freedom of the medium as an opportunity to introduce new colours into his sculptures. He specified the exact density and opacity of the materials to catch the rays of light in any way possible.
Adopting a contemporary approach deeply rooted in the visual and artistic scene of the 1980–90s, the French sculptor’s work combines with that of the American designer who saw the components of his radical and industrial set design as real sculptures – with his famous chairs visual props rather than actual seats. And so, the ultra-geometric structure of Wilson’s iconic chair, created in 1986 for the set of Hamlet Machine by Heiner Müller, is perforated, with an openwork design, to better define and punctuate the on-stage space. In the same way, the metal structures devised by Pommereulle to coordinate the volumes and screens of his sculptures remain open.
No shape is sealed. The eye circulates, like the air. With these sculptures, Pommereulle connects – while keeping them separate – the space of the sculpture and the space of the drawing, leaving them forever intertwined.
“What are we doing?” laughed Pommereulle when asked about his work. “I could give a thousand answers, the most insulting of which: ‘I am living’. But, insults aside, towards myself or others, that doesn’t sound right because I believe that everyone is balancing their light with their shadow. That’s people for you. Personally, I’m trying to understand the distance between my light and my shadow3.”
1 Interview with Arnaud Laporte, “Affaires culturelles,” episode aired on France Culture on 17 September 2021.
2 Daniel Pommereulle, quoted by Raphaël Sorin, “The cruelty of elegance”, Le Matin, 8 November 1985.
3 Interview with Éric Pestel in 1984, Daniel Pommereulle Archives.
