Loris Greaud

From the New York Times

"EVEN an artist who likes to fool around with spatiotemporal dimensions can get stressed out by a deadline. Last month technicians were working day and night to prepare for the opening of Loris Gréaud’s “Cellar Door” project at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, but Mr. Gréaud was visibly anxious that it would not be ready on time.

The strain was understandable. Mr. Gréaud, barely 29, is the first artist to take over all 40,000 square feet of this prestigious contemporary-art center. He has devoted two years to the realization of his exhibition, and the budget for the project has turned out to be double what any other show there has cost.

The director, Marc-Olivier Wahler, admitted it was an “all or nothing gamble” to give carte blanche to such a young and relatively inexperienced artist. Yet when the two started planning the undertaking, Mr. Wahler said, “it became clear that his project was so large and encompassed so many different systems, he had to have the whole space.” (Mr. Gréaud, his gallery and the filmmaker Claude Berri, who bought an artwork, helped defray the costs.)
What Mr. Gréaud has done with it is both enchanting and mind-blowingly conceptual. Like Alice down the rabbit hole, visitors enter through a black door that glides open automatically as they approach. Once inside they wander through the artist’s strange, dark universe, divided into various attractions called bubbles.

A vending machine sells candies that taste like nothing. A passage leads under a crumpled resin ceiling that was molded from the earth after a subterranean fireworks explosion — as Mr. Gréaud explained, a “celebration and manifestation of underground activity.” A steel-and-mesh structure reveals paintball warriors shooting at one another with pellets in the patented blue developed by the artist Yves Klein as the color of the immaterial.

Yet in a reflection of Mr. Gréaud’s artistic process, the work will change as it travels to other locations. It will remain at the Palais de Tokyo through April 27 and reappear in totally different forms at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Yvon Lambert gallery in New York, San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute and the gallery of Michael Benevento in Los Angeles."

More here.