JONATHAN GAINER

AEROGLYPHS: De-code Re-code

January 16 - February 21, 2026

Opening Night Photos LINK

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.

Developed from long engagement with Gulf cities - particularly Dubai and Abu Dhabi - AEROGLYPHS treats vertical modernity and engineered horizon lines as both aesthetic substrate and analytic challenge. The works neither celebrate nor negate spectacle; instead, through dialogic juxtapositions of city shapes they re-read infrastructural forms, towers, domes, interchanges, and waterfronts as operating grammars. The camera’s ‘surrogate eye’ in low urban flight updates the dérive for an aerial era, relocating psychogeography from street level to navigable airspace.

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.

Photographs are also available as 40 x 72 inches (101.6 x 182.8 cm) with an edition of 3. More works available on the artist page.