After taking over the Palais de Tokyo in 2008 with an impressive lunar forest of charred trees, and after installing a monumental, ghostly sculpture draped in a sculpted black veil under the Louvre Pyramid in 2013, Loris Gréaud returns to the museum with an exhibition that isn’t really an exhibition at all: “immaterial, disquieting and sometimes imperceptible”, “interstitial, subliminal and viral”, the exhibition entitled “Les Nuits corticales” unfolds, in a succession of surprises, at the Petit Palais, where it infiltrates, to great effect, from the façade (by night) to the galleries (by day), via the garden, “like a ghost ship” or “a haunted house”. Invasive (contaminating the entire space) and synaesthetic (appealing to all the senses), this work opera is based on a high-tech artistic device that brings to life a whole series of unlikely machines and creatures.
ON THE FRONTIERS OF THE VISIBLE AND THE IMMATERIAL
Here we are plunged into an enchanted universe where, amid the fumes and mists, organisms proliferate (the Physarum Polycephalum, nicknamed blobs), where “musician angels” (sculpture-instruments) play amidst the plasterwork of the sculpture gallery, and where, from the inner garden, the sounds of the world, captured in real time in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the depths of the Antarctic seas, the Arctic ice pack, the desert plains of Africa and the Sea of Japan, while in the South Gallery, the scent of molecules from the Milky Way wafts through the air… A highly technological and poetic new opus about ubiquity, freedom and immortality. Let’s bet it will be the “urban legend” of the moment.
STÉPHANIE DULOUT
“LORIS GRÉAUD
Les Nuits corticales” (Cortical Nights)
Petit Palais
October 4 to January 14