Loris Greaud is a French artist that is most well known for creating grand and expansive multimedia installations that contain high theater and grandiosity. Preferring to work on projects, rather than exhibitions, the sheer size and magnitude of his works find him regularly collaborating with industrial experts such as architects and engineers to execute his grand visions. His work also pulls heavily from the natural sciences, however, which often leads him to collude with physicists, zoologists, botanists and other experts within the scientific world. As with many artists, there is also a performance aspect to his projects, which also brings him into close collaboration with actors, musicians and other visual artists. One of the common and ongoing commonalities of his work, however, is the sheer, vast scale of his projects. On the whole, the artist prefers producing work that embraces a much more global vision and aims to create projects that extend far beyond the space and time of the actual “exhibition”.
But while he may be most well known for his grand and expansive works, he also has a long history of working on projects on a much smaller scale as well. Regardless of the size or scope of his work, a common theme among all of his work is teasing and toying with the space that exists between fact and fiction, truth and conjecture. In 2006, at the Frieze art fair, he worked with sculptures that were allegedly so small that they couldn’t be seen (but were still available for sale) and has written a book whose words are invisible, not to mention creating a massive body of work which was destroyed on opening night – at his direction.
In 2015, Loris Greaud took over the entire Dallas Contemporary to display one vast project entitled The Unplayed Notes Museum, which featured an earlier work he had created entitled “The Unplayed Notes” (2012). He set up the entire gallery as a fictional civilization’s natural history museum, with three main pieces as the focal point. In one room, the piece “The Unplayed Notes” (2012) featured a wall-size projection of two porn stars engaged in intercourse, but shot with a military-grade thermal camera. The second room housed “The Multiplication Tables of Obsessions and Irresolution” (2013) which utilized Baroque sculpture molds as a medium. The last room contained “[I] and [I] and [I] Riot” (2014), which featured a grid of cast aluminum hands of the Vietnamese workers who made the sculpture. Other displays included glossy black abstract paintings that resembled cave drawings, fossilized tablets, giant marble statues of angels, beast-like sculptures of uncertain species, herds of polyester foam animals and masses of silver flickering lights made of hourglass sand; all meant to be a representative sample of what an entire body of art of a singular culture might look like.
As a part of the piece, he hired actors who subsequently attacked and partially destroyed the gallery during the opening night performance. During the acting portion of the project, many of the paintings were pulled from the walls and other displays smashed beyond recognition. Approximately 75% of the art in the 20,000 foot space was destroyed on the very first night. Guests were ushered out of the building during the melee and were invited back in to walk among the ruins once the mayhem had concluded. In the spirit of true art, there is little that Loris Greaud will not do to raise consciousness and incite discussion surrounding his work. He believes that the only governing principles surrounding the project should be the the idea and the project itself. Thus he creates with little to no credence being given to aspects like appearance, display, distribution or even cost or length of time – as evidenced by the directed destruction of his work in Dallas on opening night.
Sculpt… Movie by Loris Greaud
In a complete about-face from his grandiose project in Dallas, his most recent project was a $1.5M feature film entitled “Sculpt” which starred Willem DaFoe and was shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater. For that project, however, Loris Greaud requested that all 600 of the theater’s regular seats be removed, leaving only one seat at the center of the auditorium. The two-hour film was shown between four and six times a day and viewers were invited to watch it alone. In addition, thanks to the creation of four different versions of the film, each person that watched it may have been watching an entirely different film from the last person. Each version of the film was similar in narrative arc but differed in pacing, script and sequence of events. It is estimated that at the conclusion of the showing, only 500 people had the opportunity to watch the film. A trailer for the film, however, was viewed on YouTube over half a million times prior to the film’s release.
While his audience intended the piece for may have been scaled back, the scope of the work itself was nothing short of his standard fare. The film itself took more than two years to produce and featured vast sequences shot on seven of the earth’s eight continents. But as with so much of his work, the vastness was also balanced by an impressive intimacy. One scene was filmed in a cave in central Vietnam that is all but inaccessible to outsiders, while another scene was shot at a voodoo temple in New Orleans – a deeply private (and therefore equally inaccessible) locale if ever there was one.
Loris Greaud‘s first major project took place in 2005 at the Plateau / Frac île-de-France (Paris) and was entitled Silence Goes More Quickly When Played Backwards. The project was essentially a vast “construction site” and true to form, was the culmination of a massive collaboration between Loris Greaud and a vast number of industry professionals, including engineers, architects, historians, sound designers and other artists. The theme of the project was “rumors”, and for it, Loris Greaud transformed the space into a giant storybook, which included a real life experience of a haunted house, a galaxy made up of our industrial system, radio signals that evoke teleportation, an odor-based map of the planet Mars and electric tensions that communicate with passing visitors.
His next major project was entitled Cellar Door and it built on the work he started with Silence Goes More Quickly When Played Backwards. For this project, he became the first artist to be granted full use of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Gréaud took over the entire 40,000-square foot space and filled it with installations that carried out his signature style of playing in the space between reality and imagination. He installed vending machines that dispensed candy that tasted of nothing, perfumed galleries with the imagined scent of Mars and worked with architects to help him create a building whose invisible walls were made out of panels of blown air. He continued that project at 5 major galleries throughout Europe before ending with the publication of a catalogue that charted the entire project.
Although he is widely considered to be one of the most important and influential artists of his generation, he has only occasionally agreed to appear in galleries and markets. In addition, he also rarely chooses to participate in group shows, preferring instead to focus his energy and efforts on developing personal projects. His personal projects, however, are often created in collaboration with any number of people from the worlds of art, science, architecture and engineering. In addition to convincing Willem DaFoe to star in Sculpt, the piece also featured music by the avant garde art collective the Residents- who also rarely collaborate beyond their own collective. The film also features appearances by actor Michael Lonsdale, Yves Saint Laurent muse and model Betty Catroux and Charlotte Rampling. He has also collaborated with Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo to create the score for the his piece “The Unplayed Notes” and staged an underwater fireworks show with the team at the Antares deep sea research station; not to mention working with the master of weird himself, David Lynch.
Appointed as a Knight in the French Order of Arts and Letters
He has only allowed one double exhibition in the galleries that represent him, presenting The Unplayed Notes at the Pace Gallery in New York (2012) and then at the Yvon Lambert Gallery in Paris (2012). He did, however, exhibit jointly at both the Louvre and the Pompidou Center in Paris. In that exhibition, however, he avoided the usual exhibition spaces of both institutions and instead made the exhibition free to the public by installing his pieces in the public courtyards of each museum.
In 2014, he was appointed as a Knight in the French Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres). With his 40th birthday not even yet on his horizon, Greaud has a great number of projects still to accomplish and a vast array of avenues yet to be explored. Who knows what he will come up with next.
Loris Greaud 