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  • Loris Gréaud

  • Until Jun 22
    • Recommended
  • This event has finished
  • ICA, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
  • ICA

  • By Ossian Ward

    Posted: Fri Apr 18

  • Forget the recent Brown/Sarkozy-Bruni love-in, because the latest entente cordiale is between the art galleries of London and Paris. The Centre Pompidou is restaging the superb Louise Bourgeois retrospective that premiered at Tate Modern last year (albeit in slightly more cramped conditions) and the Louvre has inaugurated ‘Babylon: City of Wonder’, which moves to the British Museum, after a brief stop in Berlin.

    Of course, there’s nothing new about major exhibitions touring from place to place, indeed museums do so in order to recoup the costs of such ambitious shows. What’s less conventional is for two institutions to have overlapping presentations of the same artist in different cities, or for them to collaborate on a project that seems to have no finite qualities – no beginning, middle or end. Welcome to the protean, shifting world of ‘Cellar Door’, an exhibition that closes this Sunday at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, but which opens, in another guise, at the ICA in London, two days earlier.

    The artist responsible is Loris Gréaud, a precocious 29-year-old French artist who studied music at the Paris Conservatoire, before being expelled for setting up a recording studio that he claimed would ‘stop music’. He then founded an unusual design agency called DGZ Research with two architect friends (they are Dölger, Gréaud, Ziakovic) who have collectively made nano-sculptures that are invisible to the naked eye, as well as jet-black Champagne and a range of sweets that taste of absolutely nothing.

    I suck on one of these colourful but characterless confections, purchased from a vending machine as ‘Celador – the taste of illusion’, as I trawl Gréaud’s ‘Cellar Door’ at the Palais de Tokyo, a cavernous space that has never before been handed over to anyone under 30. There’s a deep rumbling noise that briefly distracts me from the gelatinous nonentity in my mouth and busloads of kids flocking around what looks like London Zoo’s angular Snowdon Aviary. Suddenly, lights go up, gunfire erupts from inside the geodesic cage, and a mini-paintball war is underway. There’s no winner, as both teams splatter each other with the same blue pellets, actually a deep ultramarine called IKB (International Klein Blue) that was invented in the ’50s by le père of French conceptual artists, Yves Klein, who thought it represented the untouchable void. Far from a dry homage to past concept art, however, Gréaud’s show is a laugh riot, like visiting Universal Studios or the Science Museum but with paintgun wars and untasteable sweets – never mind your untouchable voids!

    The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ feel continues through the black forest of gunpowder-coated trees, at the end of which is a ‘Film for the void’ that switches itself off the moment anyone approaches. The effect is maddening – is there anything playing on the blank screen when I’m not here? – but the forest reference is a little too obvious – after all if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Certainly, a lot of Gréaud’s freewheeling doesn’t come off (there’s also an accompanying opera and supposedly some subterranean fireworks, which might explain the rumbling) but his ability to work anywhere, across many fields, producing anything is what makes him fascinating – like seeing creativity in action or watching synapses firing in the brain. When the ‘Cellar Door’ reopens in London, who knows what strange delights he’ll have in store?
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  • Details

  • ICA, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
    , UK
    Geo: 51.506609, -0.130585
  • 020 7930 3647
  • Category: Art museums & institutions
  • Times: Daily 12noon-7pm, Thur until 9pm
  • Tube: Charing Cross

  • Map

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roxi1976

I'm an easy going confident girl who works hard and likes to play hard. I work in central London in Media and spend my spare time at the gym, home,...

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