NEW YORK, NY.- The Pace Gallery presents Loris Gréaud: The Unplayed Notes, on view at 534 West 25th Street from May 5 through June 9, 2012. This exhibition marks the first major gallery presentation of Gréaud’s work to date and his first exhibition in New York in nearly six years. The Unplayed Notes will feature a series of site-specific, multisensory installations that activate new ways of experiencing Gréaud’s on-going investigation of altered realities. The exhibition will also include the U.S. premiere of the film, One Thousand Ways to Enter (2011), which was originally conceived for the artist’s traveling museum exhibition CELLAR DOOR. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Saturday, May 5 from 6 to 8 P.M.
Known for creating long-term projects and immersive large-scale installations riddled with deep philosophical and conceptual undercurrents, Gréaud refers to his process as an “empirical machine,” often collaborating with engineers, architects, musicians, historians, and scientists. For his solo exhibition at The Pace Gallery, Gréaud continues to “remix the fabric of reality,” constructing unique environments that house subtle spatiotemporal disruptions to alter and expand the subliminal boundaries of perception and reflection. Gréaud has created a galactic black corridor—entirely composed of charcoal made from the incinerated ashes of previous works and artist’s proofs—activated by strange cinematic movement and fluctuating vibrations. Asteroid-like rocks, also the product of compressed ash, are suspended from two spider-like light fixtures with mechanical arms that slowly rotate through the space. In a second installation, Gréaud has transposed Maurice Blanchot’s 1941 experimental novel Thomas the Obscure into an electronic language that communicates the story through blasts of air ranging from a simple breath to a storm blast of wind.
Gréaud’s continual exploration of ambiguous narratives manifests in the conceptual film One Thousand Ways to Enter. Black and white footage of clouds of smoke billowing under water was subjected to Rorschach mirror imaging in post-production, synthesizing a purely abstract projection that serves as a catalyst for the subjective evolution of an open-ended narrative. The accompanying soundtrack—an acoustic collection of white noise—was created by the legendary guitarist from Sonic Youth, Lee Ranaldo, who was recorded imagining the most beautiful guitar solo possible in an anechoic chamber at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris. The film attempts to extend image and sound to an interpretive and conceptual mental state.
The last room of The Unplayed Notes features six towering sculptures of veiled figures, installed on pedestals, seemingly frozen in time. The moment of unveiling is stretched to infinity; their identity suspended in a state of irresolution. Forty-four unique panels, the result of a photographic and chemical experiment Gréaud realized at the Musée de Louvre, are hung floor-to-ceiling. These photo-sensitive panels were installed in front of famous 19th- and 20th-century paintings in specific galleries within the museum. Over a period of twenty-four hours the changing conditions of light and shadow were recorded, capturing the “aura” of these master paintings as alluring black and white abstractions.
In May 2013, the Musée du Louvre and the Centre Georges Pompidou will partner for the first time in history to present a solo project of new work by Gréaud.
The artist joined The Pace Gallery in 2011. The same year, he was invited to participate in the official 54th Venice Biennale exhibition, ILLUMInations, curated by Bice Curiger. His large-scale installation Gunpowder Trees Forest Bubble was also included in the collateral group exhibition The World Belongs to You curated by Caroline Bourgeois at the Palazzo Grassi. For the Biennale, Gréaud took over the canal entrance of the Arsenale with The Geppetto Pavilion, a colossal sculpture of a 55-foot-long beached sperm whale, inviting visitors to enter the belly of the whale and partake in an experience that had previously only been made tangible in tales and legends. The Geppetto Pavilion will be on view in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco next year.
For more than a decade, Loris Gréaud (b. 1979, Eaubonne, France) has drawn an atypical trajectory on the international contemporary art scene. His work has been widely exhibited in public institutions throughout the world, and in recent years, he has been the subject of significant museum exhibitions in major cities worldwide, including Hong-Kong, Tokyo, London, Berlin, Milan, and Paris. In 2008, at the age of only 29, Gréaud became the first and only artist to date to take over all 40,000 square feet of the prestigious contemporary art center Palais de Tokyo in Paris with his monumental and fantastical multidisciplinary installation CELLAR DOOR, which grew into a series of exhibitions and works revolving around the imagined narrative of an artist’s studio detached from time and space. The project, which spanned five years and was site-specific to each venue, traveled to some of Europe’s most respected institutions, including the ICA, London; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland; La Conservera, Murcia, Spain, and culminated in the summer of 2011 at the Kunsthalle Wien in Austria. The final exhibition coincided with the release of a comprehensive monograph, published by JRP│Ringier.
