Loris Gréaud Solo Exhibition "I"

Venue: Centre Pompidou | Dates: Mid-June to Mid-July | Text & Photos: Chen Chi-Hsiang

Loris Gréaud (born 1979) is one of France’s most representative and radical contemporary artists, spanning diverse disciplines such as music, design, advertising, architecture, sculpture, theater, painting, video, film, performance, body, technology, science, physics, environment, and time-space. His work creates extraordinary dramatic, symbolic, and metaphorical experiences that engage all senses—visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and hallucinatory—awakening deep inner perception. In exploring contemporary art’s diversity, Gréaud transforms real scenes into artistic fictions, acting as a transit station for these symbolic products where media connect systematic concepts. Like a film director or symphony conductor, his exhibitions are complex projects where he builds experiential machines, directs ideas and exchanges views, then arranges extraordinary scenes through installations, realizing final plans.

Gréaud’s practice uses a mutated record across all works, translating various forms of mutation into different rules: a wave becomes light, noise becomes sculpture, sound becomes an object, etc., crossing contemporary art practices and fashion discourse. This solo exhibition at Centre Pompidou features the theme "I," where Gréaud constructs two black monument-like works: a black bubble mat on the floor and an electric rotating ladder nearly 10 meters high. "I" points to a vertical tower, reflecting consistent mathematical imagination and signs of electrical intensity. This is a dual exhibition, simultaneously showing "Veiled Sculpture" under the Louvre Pyramid. Seeing a seemingly ordinary constantly rotating staircase and a cushion at Centre Pompidou, viewers wonder: Where is art? Art is everywhere, right before our eyes. Visiting Centre Pompidou is about "seeing." So open your eyes and look; whether there are clues is another matter.

Crowds gather curiously by the railing. Periodically, performers in black climb slowly and elegantly to the top of the five-story rotating ladder. Following signals like red-and-white flags on the ground, they leap down with gravitational acceleration. With a splash, they fall into the bubble mat. This repeated dramatic performance surprises audiences, showcasing interdisciplinary artistic creation beyond perception and imagination, sometimes leaving people bewildered. Yet, participation itself brings new artistic experience and insight. As artist Kendell Geers said: "I try to create unique spaces where audiences must take responsibility for facing the exhibited artwork. Of course, people have the freedom to leave or continue visiting. If they decide to delve into my work, they become active viewers... Danger often surrounds my works inevitably."

Vertical towers (or skyscrapers) are symbols of modernist utopia: the falling body depicts a sculpture enduring gravity’s test. The moving machine praises motion; the jumping figure constructs dynamic sculpture, revealing human vanity marked by rhythmic time. Gréaud’s electric rotating ladder is dramatic but belongs not to any amusement park world; it purely invites viewers to contemplate and question the object. This exhibition involves sculpture, object, behavior, attitude, action, performance, and theater—visual, psychological, physical, sensory, and referential—between objects and sculptures, physics and psychology, reality and imagination. As Gréaud wrote in the "Temporal-Spatial Fault Line" section: "This bubble has its own validity; it should be consumed within a limited period. Fortune tellers read your past in reverse narratives. It is based on how to clarify more with less explanation, using worldly machines to perform recitations, rare languages in scenes and characters, and clear streaks and gaps. The bubble itself does not bring existing stage set forms, but establishes a new abstraction starting from this already existing fine combination."