The work of French artist Philippe Parreno is a bit hard to describe. It’s multi-media, sure, but also ephemeral and often wispy as dreams. Such qualities suit the artist’s main subject, which in a word is memory, as well as the conceptual complexity of an oeuvre spanning 20 years and counting. Sculpture, film, staging, music and performance are all part of the mix, in which elements made for one exhibition get rolled into the next, in a kind of nested progression where each show serves as a sort of remembrance for the previous one. Yet each is also site-specific and tailored to its location—New York, in the case of H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, which contains allusions to the return of Bobby Kennedy’s funeral train through upstate, and to Marilyn Monroe’s stay in a New York City hotel just a few weeks before her suicide. Life and death, light and dark are the themes touched upon by the objects and effects here, which include minimally elegant, lighted marquee sculptures (the artist’s signature) and a system of huge shades that are periodically raised to allow daylight to pierce the darkened interior of the Park Avenue Armory’s cavernous Drill Hall. Objects are illuminated and switched off, films begin and end, and live piano music stops and starts in a timed sequence lasting two and a half hours. But you don’t need to stay for it all to be enthralled by H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS’s spellbinding charms.
