Der junge französischen Konzeptkünstler Loris Gréaud (geb. 1979) verwandelt Räume in opulente Inszenierungen, in bildhafte, begehbare Settings, in denen geschichtsträchtige Materialien und geschichtenerzählende Skulpturenkonstellationen zusammenklingen. Zunächst in der Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris und dann im Sinne des filmischen Cross-Fade-Prinzips in der Berliner Galerie lässt er die Grenzen zwischen Realität und mythischer Fiktion in einem diffusen violetten Licht verschwimmen, aus dem die Skulpturen auftauchen: elektrifizierte Sporen, die von der Decke hängen, mit Plastiksprengstoff gewaltsam modellierte Keramiken, Öffnungen im Galerieboden, gefüllt mit Schutt vom Drehort von Andrei Tarkowskis Film Stalker, und ein komplexes Objekt geformt wie ein Baum, dessen Äste scheinbar von Blitzen bewegt werden – eine fremde Landschaft konstruiert aus toten Elementen als zeitgenössische Form eines Vanitas-Bildes. In dichten Ausstellungaufnahmen und Werkbildern mit erläuternden Texten führt das Buch durch die vielschichtigen Tableaus von Loris Gréaud. QR-Codes bieten Links zu Trailern und Videos der bewegten Arbeiten, darunter die dritte Station im Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, dessen Direktor Fabrice Hergott mit seinem einleitenden Text ein künstlerisches Universum von dunkler Schönheit vorstellt.

ONE DAY
(Auszug aus dem Text von Fabrice Hergott)

Gréaud’s oeuvre is a life-work, but not that of the artist’s life – a possessive that makes no sense in his output. It is the life that he observes, reproduces and replays in his interventions. the life of life, as it were – and on a huge time scale: the time of life’s appearance and disappearance. Here the artist and spectator are protocols of perception and production, temporary and fragile in this flux moving from past to future, a flux that the oeuvre seeks to record with obsessive and imaginative precision. If one had to define Gréaud’s subject, it would be that most enigmatic narrative, the history of the human being in the broadest sense: humanity with everything that it perceives, learns, knows and undertakes, with all its knowledge and memories. But a humanity conscious of the threats it faces, first and foremost the threat represented by its own species…

Only very recently has modern humanity understood that its coming was as late as the planet is fragile – and that everything could disappear. And though it might seem unconnected, the timing of this new awareness coincided with humanity’s capacity to self-destruct. It is as if knowing a thing must inevitably be accompanied by the need to realize and indeed anticipate it. Discovering its fragility, humanity invented the atomic bomb and, with it, the possibility of ending its own existence, along with that of all living species and of the planet itself – even before the next asteroid darkens the horizon. This may have occurred through a sort of promethean megalomania, a sullen desire to master the means of humanity’s own destruction, since destruction there will inevitably be.

Everything becomes precarious. Happiness and pleasure are no longer the same substance. Unhappiness itself is different. A tree is a miracle, nature a succession of wonders. But nature is disappearing, seemingly abandoning the sinking ship, encouraged by a human species fascinated with its own power, a power associated with destruction. Gréaud reconstructs the real in the light of this new perspective. Life becomes an anxious universe full of dark beauty, in which high technology coexists with the most elementary forms. The history of mankind is integrated with that of life, computer science with biology, in a reality that pertains as much to pre-history as to science fiction. Time itself is no longer the same. a living organism, the blob, which develops under the effect of heat and humidity, is a metaphor of all life on earth. Gréaud’s works and installations are a huge apparatus recording this vision.

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In Zusammenarbeit mit Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin | Paris | London und Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris