Cyprien Gaillard - "Today Diggers, Tomorrow Dickens" - NYTimes.com 530 West 21st Street, Chelsea Cyprien Gaillard's first exhibition at the Gladstone Gallery is miles better than the dispiriting show that preceded it: Damián Ortega's alphabet of shadows, cast on the floor by suspended pieces of bent rebar. But that is not saying much. The combination of giant, slightly altered, out-of-context ready-mades arrayed in a pristine gallery is by now a tired convention. In Mr. Gaillard's case, the objects are the imposing shovels - called excavation heads - from earth-moving machines used in mining or demolition, some of which are around eight feet high. Thematically, these macho steel forms are consistent with Mr. Gaillard's best-known efforts: the brutal videos of immense, depersonalizing Eastern-bloc apartment complexes and of the staged fights between gangs of men who have apparently been dehumanized by living in them. The shovels evoke similar harshness and gladiatorial combat, and they frequently proffer scarified patterns, suggesting gang tattoos, apparently made with blow torches by the men who used them. But here the pieces are cowed, tamed by their isolation and by the rods of beautiful, fragile yellow onyx that run through the holes that once attached them to their machines. The rods have a civilizing effect on the otherness of the shovels, like the gold ormolu with which Europeans decorated, and appropriated, Chinese porcelains. In the gallery's upstairs space, Mr. Gaillard offers an alternative to the ostentation below: a series of slightly altered issues of National Geographic. They lie open with three pages tucked into their spines, forming a kind of ruffle, and present images - and parts of images - of nature either untouched or contaminated by humans. Here, less is not more, but it's a start.