You enter the exhibition as you would enter a metal cathedral: in silence, captivated by the light. Before you are three trucks; not toys, but almost. Vintage Chevrolets, black as night, polished to reflect the soul of the visitor. At the rear, three steel columns soar towards the ceiling. This is the Truck Trilogy, Walter De Maria's monumental work, completed after his death and exhibited for the first time outside the United States, in the immaculate hangar at Le Bourget where Gagosian presents The Singular Experience.
The Truck Trilogy at Gagosian: Three trucks to defy time
‘Walter refused to explain his works; he wanted everyone to be able to establish a direct relationship with what they saw,’ says Donna De Salvo, curator of the exhibition and close collaborator of the artist. ‘It's a belief I deeply share: art is not there to be deciphered, but to be experienced.’ In De Maria's work, metal becomes silence, geometry becomes emotion. The visitor is no longer a spectator: they are put to the test, invited to feel time stretching out.
In the vastness of the hall, the three trucks seem ready to set off on an inner journey. Their perfectly chrome surfaces reflect the world with almost cruel precision: the floor, the ceiling, the approaching silhouettes. ‘Walter has an almost scientific rigour,’ continues De Salvo, "but also a sense of playfulness, a fantasy that is often forgotten. His works are not cold: they exude curiosity and childhood. "
And it's true that it's easy to imagine Walter as a child, fascinated by mechanics, tinkering with model trucks before inventing these: luminous behemoths, both sculptures and souvenirs. The seriousness of minimalism is mixed here with the naivety of grand departures. These vehicles have no destination, only a tension: that of suspended movement.
‘The Truck Trilogy,’ Donna De Salvo continues, ‘condenses everything Walter was: precision, excess and a desire never to confine his work to a definition.’ She smiles. ‘You can't pigeonhole him, he would have hated that.’ And he would no doubt have laughed to see his name written on the walls of a contemporary art gallery: he who preferred the desert, the void, the solitude of plains crossed by lightning.
For behind these gleaming trucks lie the great works of his life: The Lightning Field (1977), 1,680 steel poles erected in New Mexico; The Broken Kilometer (1979), five hundred gold bars lined up in New York; and The New York Earth Room, a loft filled with black earth that you have to breathe in to understand. ‘These works,’ says Donna De Salvo, ‘are designed to slow down time. They invite contemplation. Like life, they remain full of contradictions.’
The Singular Experience: Obsession with measurement and excess
But The Singular Experience does not stop at excess. In the neighbouring rooms, the exhibition reveals a more intimate, almost secret Walter. Preparatory drawings and geometric sketches show the rigour of a thinker obsessed with measurement and chance. Photographs of his desert installations recall his taste for isolation and absolute gesture. Further on, a few pieces in dried mud, traces of a rarely shown experimental series, reveal an almost organic relationship with the material, as if the artist were seeking to reconnect with the earth after so much polished steel.
‘We often forget,’ Donna De Salvo points out, ‘that Walter was a wonderful artist. These sketches show the freedom of his spirit. He has the same precision as a mathematician, but also the unpredictability of a poet.’
At Gagosian, this presence takes on a particular significance. Le Bourget, this vast steel and concrete hangar, becomes almost a natural extension of the work: a place where time seems to have stopped, suspended between two metallic resonances. These trucks, lined up like silent totems, speak less of speed than of duration.
They do not move: they watch. Their immobility commands a form of respect. ‘Walter had this obsession with frozen time, with the moment when everything shifts in perception,’ explains Donna De Salvo. And that is exactly what we feel here: something immobile that nevertheless moves forward, not in space, but in our gaze.
When we leave the gallery, we know even less about him than when we entered. And that is undoubtedly the greatest achievement: transforming metal into meditation, drawing into silence, mud into memory. ‘Walter wanted us to experience it, not understand it,’ concludes Donna De Salvo. So we remain silent and imagine, somewhere between earth and silence, his three trucks watching over the mystery of the world forever.
Practical information: Walter De Maria: The Singular Experience, until 18 April 2026 at Gagosian Le Bourget, 26 av. de l'Europe.
Translated by Bethszabee Garner
