When asked why he chose to paint almost exclusively animals, Gilles Aillaud replied "because I love them". Contemporary with the first pop works and their more or less distant fascination with consumer products and mass communication, Gilles Aillaud's subjects could appear exotic. Today's questions about our relationship with the living make his iconography less incongruous, and underline the importance of this retrospective. This long-awaited exhibition is an opportunity to (re)discover Gilles Aillaud's work. The manifest objectivity of his art makes him the putative father of a new generation of artists fascinated by a realism borrowed from modern image technologies. Gilles Aillaud became a painter because he was unable to become a philosopher. From his early training, his painting has inherited a hybrid nature, the equivalent of what the Chinese tradition called: a literate painting.