Leo Caillard, born in Paris, France in 1985, is a multi-media and digital artist whose work frames contemporary art and fashion in a larger historical context. He challenges us to consider the “new natural” of our digitally and technologically enhanced lifestyles in order to rethink the future. He tries “to show what we think we know differently, so as to shake-up our convictions and establish a dialogue between periods. We are at a crossroads of sweeping changes requiring us to look back at our past history.”

Graduating from École des Gobelins in 2008, Caillard first gained prominence through his digitally manipulated photo series, ‘Art Games’ and ‘War Games’ in 2010. The Artsy editors describe these series as “a new dystopian form of history painting.” In 2012, his original ‘Hipsters in Stone’ series caught the attention of bloggers all over the globe. Caillard digitally “dressed” classic sculptures in modern garb, encouraging us to think about the way we dress to express or values, affiliations, and desires.

Regarding his choice of clothing for this series, he said, “The ‘hipster’ trend with long beards, long hair, worshipping the body through sport, all this resembles Greco-Roman characteristics found in statuary. Suddenly, through clothes, our perspective changes dramatically and we cannot fail to see these statues in another light, like individuals today, leading back to our own entry in global history.”

Since 2012, Caillard has expanded his ouvre from digitally manipulated photography to physical sculpture, including many series of ‘Hipsters in Stone,’ and ‘Hipsters in Bronze.’ He uses classical materials and sculpting techniques to represent contemporary fashion and mannerisms, developing, as he has said, the “dialog between periods to lay the foundations for a better future.”

His subject matter in these series is not mythical, as many Greco-Roman sculptures with which we are familiar. Rather, he represents the potential for the mythologizing of our day-to-day narratives. Headphones, for instance, may soon be a relic of the past; seeing them carved into marble is a sharp reminder that while art is a static document, a representation of the present moment, reality hurdles forward through time at an ever-quickening speed.