Korean artist Kimsooja, invited by Galeries Lafayette to “inhabit” her historic dome, gave herself to a form of remembrance. Having chosen to dress it with a film diffracting light into rainbow spectra, it pays homage to Jaques Grüber, the great master glassmaker of Art Nouveau who, when the dome was built in 1912, had created colorful stained-glass windows, subsequently deposited and replaced by white glass.
After the Crystal Palace of Madrid and the Cathedral of Metz, here for two months, the great “luxury bazaar” neo-Byzantine again flooded with iridescent hues. A luminous cladding accompanied by a body experience offered to visitors in the heart of the dome, or, more precisely, in the in-between cupola, where we are invited to breathe the artist’s work “at the rhythm of his own breath” in order to live, in our turn, the illuminated space…
It is a question of mixing “the energy of the breath” with “the sensitive experience of color” “in the heart of a changing chromatic space” in order to make visible and perceptible “two essential principles of life”: air and light.
Expecting to infuse a “creative energy” within the store, Kimsooja takes us in his very experimental and contemplative conception of the work of art: adept of the “non-far” principle, the artist seeks to make perceptible intangible notions, such as the passage of time, and to “question the forces at work in art and life, inviting everyone to experience and feel the world in all its surfaces.”
Galeries Lafayette,
40, bd Hausmann, Paris IX,
8th and 5th floor
Until 30 June