Loris Gréaud "Cellar door" Solo Exhibition at Palais de Tokyo

In a pitch-black space, folded white neon tubes are used to construct light lines on a reduced scale, based on the Palais de Tokyo’s architectural design and perspective drawings. Spatial Dissonance, 2007. Foreword: Loris Gréaud's solo exhibition "Cellar door" was grandly presented at the Palais de Tokyo Contemporary Art Center in Paris from February 14 to April 27, 2007. Born in 1979, Loris Gréaud is one of France’s most representative young artists; before turning thirty, he already had an impressive exhibition record. In today’s most important art capitals—Tokyo, New York, London, Berlin, and now Paris, thehall of contemporary art—at the Palais de Tokyo, his solo exhibition titled "Cellar door" demonstrates achievements that are rare for an artist at the peak of their career in the contemporary art world.

Gréaud was originally a student at the French National Conservatory of Music, intending to become a musician. However, he was expelled in 1993 and established his own Sibilance music and film laboratory, developing innovative electronic music for young people. After the dream of becoming a musician faded, he entered the Cergy Pontoise University of Fine Arts near Paris, seeking to become an avant-garde visual artist. His innovative explorations quickly brought him into the Parisian art scene. In 2002, he participated in the opening of Plateau, a contemporary art space north of Paris. In 2004, he collaborated with architects Marc Dölger, Damien Ziakovic, and the DGZ multi-product studio to create a "Utopia" project, featuring invisible sculptures like black champagne or candies with hallucinogenic flavors. In 2005, he created the inventive sound installation Tremors were forever. Through physical phenomena in this enclosed exhibition space, he vibrated the four walls and floor with the intensity of sound, resembling an earthquake-like primordial explosion. Another notable work, Devils towe satellite, referenced the magical mountain from Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind; the artist towed the work through Paris by car, creating a remarkable performance and action. Later that year, he held a solo exhibition of light and sound installations titled Silence Goes More Quickly when Played Backwards at Plateau, and after winning the Ricard Prize for Young French Artists, his artistic prospects soared, becoming one of France’s most forward-looking and international artists. His current solo exhibitions at contemporary art spaces in Paris and shows at Yvon Lambert Gallery in New York sufficiently prove his artistic achievements.

Diverse Creative Perspectives and Fashion Discourse: Loris Gréaud is a rare artist in today’s art world who spans multiple disciplines such as music, design, advertising, architecture, sculpture, theater, materiality, painting, video, film, performance, audio-visuals, body, technology, science, physics, environment, and time-space. In reality, imagination, dreams, and fiction, his works possess extraordinary dramatic, symbolic, and metaphorical qualities, touching all audience senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and illusion, awakening deep inner perceptions. In the current exploration of artistic diversity, the artist recreates real scenes into art, much like contemporary fiction, becoming a transfer station for these symbolic products where media connect systematic concepts. Like a director in a film or a conductor in a symphony orchestra, his exhibitions are complex projects where he creates empirical machines, directs concepts and exchanges views, then arranges extraordinary scenes through his concepts and equipment, realizing his final plans. Gréaud’s creation uses a mutated record in all his works, transferring records of all mutated forms, interpreting them under different rules, so that a wave of attraction becomes light, noise becomes sculpture, sound becomes object, etc. Clearly, Gréaud’s concept of diverse creation, influenced by Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, further updates this cross-disciplinary practice.

Loris Gréaud’s "Cellar door" solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, where "Cellar door" refers to urban legend, is the most fashionable, beautiful, and perfect phonetic combination. The entire exhibition is like an extraordinary theater or fantasy factory, and it is the first time since the Palais de Tokyo opened that the center has dedicated an entire show to a single young artist. This massive organizational exhibition is like a series of complex continuous stories, connecting various categories and fashionable products, between cosmic and micro sculptures, ballistic and design elements, filled with various charming fashions, carrying noise—through his methods of diffusion in a common overall communication network, perfectly transmitting diverse information. Similar to Lewis Carroll’s method, and under mythological narratives, Gréaud’s performances exist between time and space (ubiquitous, accelerated), and between interpretive systems and present faces (cause-effect, reality-virtual, image-asexual reproduction). The entire exhibition condenses around the artist’s unimaginable conceptual axis in a mutant form. In this time-space, through a series of light movements, musical writings (virtual) articles, and variations of ballistic light, the Palais de Tokyo is transformed into a changing giant theater (13 themed theaters), performed under modern architectural structures, innovative design scenes, and smooth visitor routes, leading the audience into an extraordinary fantasy factory or an unusual journey into the category of "Noosphère."

Exhibition Introduction and Score Texts: This extraordinary fantasy factory is like a continuously connected utopian amusement machine and a journey of modern urban legends. Let us first look at an article on the exhibition wall and several interpretations on scores (which help our visit and understanding of the works): "There is a door—a solid door—where the future enters first. In this story, there is neither beginning nor frustration, so events have always been auditory, known to all about this everything." "This is the story of Studio, a vast studio distributed in time and space, simultaneously present, humming machines, proposals, and electronic music after a grand magical score. He involves at least a 'Fantasy Factory' more than a 'Factory of Dreams,' a layer of production line more magical than Jack’s magic beans, more distorted than Alice’s mirror, a place where wires climb clouds, and where micro-parallel stripes circulate." "Studio produces countless electrostatic groups and solves dilemmas for its competitors—yet deeplyfall into in the endlessness of time and space, because Studio’s dreams have nothing in common with simple amusement. Its function does not fill existential defects, but rather opens gaps and digs holes as beaches to restore reality."

Look at some texts on the scores: In the section "Tense-Spatial Fault," it reads: "Similarly, this bubble has its validity; this bubble is best consumed within a limited period. Fortune tellers tell your fortune, narrating backwards all your past. This is built on how to clarify more with at least, worldly machines performing recitation, rare languages in scenes and characters, and in clear strips and cracks. The bubble itself does not bring existing stage set forms, but establishes a new abstraction starting from this already existing fine combination." On the score for "Shadow of the Studio," it writes: "A plan for a future studio, which people cannot yet imagine this bubble. Light shines directly on the earth (ground). Here light meets bubbles, tens of millions of light-years will pass. Along the way, visit a house where walls mix with music and silence. People call this a studio. Light illuminates the house’s space, lighting corners and turns, shadows projected on the house’s walls in the past. People call this an exhibition. This answers the understood question if the future starts from the front or back doesn’t matter: here the shadow arrives first." In the score for the "Sculptural Scene" section, it writes: "Beautiful this hellish tormenting bubble, it will explode with this gentle M46 colored powder gun. Players face off, hoping to shoot their opponents. Sometimes in this game it is endless: rules determined by standing up and doing as one pleases. When temporality regulations melt into markers for measuring things, volume loses its volume, and entity loses becoming entity. To re-materialize time-space in the conflicting atmosphere, players are responsible for holding guns and art history. They accuse each other 'Who are you?' and hide behind hills without waiting for a response, firing anyway, because waiting for a killer is impossible, questioning is delaying. Play! Play! Without any consciousness of one’s fate, it never leads to any result. Players’ disputes are endless. And for these professionals, there is no better way to make them understand stories never experienced." In the score for the "Forest of Gunpowder Trees" section, it writes: "An explosion of illusion or an illusion of explosion. This bubble is consistently considered like a model of dead trees installed in an abnormal contradictory garage. Like a territorial proportion map, they are naturally human-scale. Sometimes, based on their burnt gunpowder basic combinations, these dead trees can operate to another world, faster than Formula 1 cars, reserved for athletes who prefer extreme sports."

Fantasy Factory or Urban Legend Journey: Visiting this fantasy factory or entering this unusual multi-category journey requires passing through an automatically opening door, entering this futuristic time-space, like entering a future world. First, "Spatial Dissonance" in a closed pitch-black space uses a series of folded white neon tubes to construct light lines on a reduced scale, based on the Palais de Tokyo’s architectural design drawings and perspective lines. Through the extension of upper and lower black lenses, it infinitely reflects, forming an unimaginable celestial universe, and creating dissonant space or poetic space. Next, the fireproof canvas-covered canopy on the ceiling—the work "Underground Fireworks"—if not for textual interpretation, no one would know what it means. The text reads: "On August 17, 2006, at 2:27 a.m., a large amount of fireworks were buried 3 meters 70 centimeters underground, on a ground area of 280 square feet. The ground was quite wet after the explosion; here it serves as the ceiling, celebrating this underground activity." Even with this explanation, we still cannot imagine the colorful underground fireworks ritual. Under the "Underground Fireworks" canopy, there is a vending machine filled with rows of colorfully packaged confusing candies—"Celador, hallucinogenic tasting candies." Viewers can insert two euros to buy and consume them directly, like cold medicine syrup said to be very sweet, containing a strange sense of hallucination in the mouth. In the art of purchasing, consuming, and tasting, it elucidates that art is like candy. Next to it, in the window, the "Broadcast Control Room" is the waiting room for the exhibition space, and even more so the sensitive nerve and dominant core of the entire exhibition. From 2 p.m. to 8 p.m. daily, a staff member specially controls the scene music and atmosphere of each unit in the whole venue, thereby re-establishing the time and state of visibility.

At the end of "Underground Fireworks" is the object and video installation "Interrelated Galaxy Design." A flat geometric patterned carpet platform on four sides; many viewers come here to sit on this low platform to rest and wander around (viewers become characters in this theater). On the wall, a TV constantly plays poetic sunset scenes, followed by the magnificent galaxy full of stars. Systematic galaxies produce geometric light forms showing constellations. This compilation of galaxy constellation names provides the possibility for this unbalanced time tunnel’s interrelated galaxy design. The motive is to combine geodetic astronomy, determining the structure of cosmic holistic thinking. On the same wall, a small window is opened, where people curiously peek to watch "Failed Fiction." Inside is a small cinema, where the front screen is playing super 16mm white light or failed films. Nothing is there, like disappearing memories, very, very distant, making one unable to remember what images, or an empty story content. Blankness becomes the core of the image, watching with eyes closed. From "Interrelated Galaxy Design," viewers enter the time tunnel "Tense-Spatial Fault," a light and sound installation. Here, the 2005 work Silence Goes More Quickly when Played Backwards from Plateau Contemporary Art Space is re-installed. Arranged along the corridor space, two rows of series white neon lights on the ceiling flash periodically. A red line extending infinitely on the wall strikes a spray mist. Series hanging lamps in the corner occasionally transmit discordant music interfering with people’s telepathy. Three light paintings alternate flashing. Plant cultivation under pink atmosphere white lights. Overall, time-space is reconfigured in the satellite project, defining Tense-Spatial Fault. Then enter "Reality Substitution," a painting and chandelier installation. Familiar images are obviously the scene painting series from the 2005 "Tense-Spatial Fault." Hanging in the middle is a string of chandeliers of various sizes. Data images become paintings; paintings ultimately are images; images replace reality; paintings replace images; paintings exist autonomously in their realistic forms.

In this urban legend journey or dream factory, every scene, every object, every sound, every image, every setting deeply entangles the audience, from feelings, body, illusion, dreams, psychology, physiology, and other perceptual experiences, as if personally experiencing a magical realm and Alice’s dreamland. Most striking is the huge "Sculptural Scene" installation performance setting. In a futuristic facade diamond-shaped architectural form and space, glass windows are covered with a net (to protect viewers from non-material colored paint attacks). Inside, two mountain-like structures form an extraordinary theater scene. Periodically, under the rhythm of electronic music and light, two teams wearing protective gear and masks, holding air guns, appear like warriors from Star Wars, performing a scene of fierce confrontation with air guns. Warriors hide behind diamond-shaped hills, dramatically firing non-material colored paints, exciting viewers unexpectedly like Alice, with the dreamlike present right before their eyes, accepting a visual and spiritual shock. The artist stated, "If the world were too monochromatic, people would not need art." Is it really true? A society without art would suffocate. On a pitch-black large wall, a projector projects an architecturally designed facade of a studio imagined by the artist—"Shadow of the Studio." Strong and powerful in black-and-white contrasting lines (like light and shadow) and large perspective scenes, it becomes the core of the exhibition’s imagination. On the wall, two series (140 pieces) of neatly unlit neon tubes. Viewers will certainly question why they are not lit. Look at the exhibition interpretation "Exploding Neon Tubes." Surprisingly, if these neon tubes (the gas light fluorescence inside the artist’s tubes is replaced by exploding propane) are plugged in, they will explode. Thus, the distance between what is visible and what is imaginable is worlds apart. Of course, what is visible can be imagined, but what is imaginable is not necessarily visible. Seeing is not so superficial; it is a sign, index, and metaphor, with deeper associations. Finally, viewers arrive at the post-explosion scene of "Forest of Gunpowder Trees." Super-real or surreal pitch-black dead forest (burnt forest, coated with a layer of gunpowder, perhaps symbolizing or referring to the aftermath of war or natural disaster). Added with a huge sun, this scene appears even more absurd, desolate, and magically disillusioned. Periodically, the huge sun’s strong red-white light disappears, transforming into the lonely moonlight of late night, strengthening the disillusioned scene of the dead forest, dramatically referring to the operation of time-space, natural ecology, and the pause of humanity’s bleak prospects. In this bizarre forest, another innovative work—"Empty Film": a white box-type video recorder box (a 16mm video recorder hidden inside) and a rectangular white screen opposite. Viewers always curiously want to see what is there. Here, nothing is there (at least projecting a beam of light). When viewers approach to see clearly, this light automatically disappears. When viewers leave, this light continues to play. This very materialized empty film, does it not imply the constant idling in people’s daily lives? Or induce a fun game where viewers become the watched? Or is art itself an idling fantasy machine? Finally, it is more like what Buddhism often says: "Everything is empty." This emptiness is not that emptiness. Clearly, Loris Gréaud’s works are distributed between entangling forms (design and typology) and psychoculture (imagination and Disegno), smoothly converting charm, feeling, and perception, from neuronal sounds to telepathic illusions.