JONATHAN GAINER

AEROGLYPHS: De-code Re-code

January 16 - February 21, 2026 | OPENING: Friday, January 16, 2026 | 6-8 pm

Bruno David is pleased to present AEROGLYPHS: De-code | Re-code, an exhibition by Dubai-based artist Jonathan Gainer. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

AEROGLYPHS presents a suite of large-format wall works that approach the city as a writing _system. Each picture originates as real, drone-sourced photography gathered through rigorous aviation protocols. From this material, Jonathan Gainer composes masked and blended photography constructions that stage the built environment as a set of ‘cityglyphs’ - signs through which architecture signals emotion while encoding movement, ambiance, and belief. The chain of production remains strictly photographic; no AI or CGI is used.

Gainer’s camera-based engagement with architectural rhetoric and urban form follows studies in international relations, French cultural studies, and philosophy/comparative literature (American University; Sorbonne/Paris IV; Freie Universität Berlin).

Years of screenwriting in Berlin and more than a decade of filmmaking and stills photography in the Middle East inform a practice that pairs cultural literacy with cinematographic rigor. His professional history includes pioneering aerial cinematography in the Middle East and work on high-visibility productions and commissions, which established a discipline of precision piloting and compositional fluency now redirected toward art.

The installation premieres new works from the Cityglyphs: De-code | Re-code arc, situating the series within ongoing debates on the urban sublime, image ethics, and the status of photography amid proliferating synthetic imagery. In AEROGLYPHS, authorship is a discipline of capture and edit: the pictures hold to the real while proposing other ways of reading it.