Loris Gréaud: LADI ROGEURS: SIR LOUDRAGE – a still life

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Loris Gréaud has pursued an atypical path in the field of contemporary art. His work prioritises the idea of the ‘project’. Using this temporally limited concept as a frame for his practice enables the artist to intervene with the given conditions of space and time. Systematically blurring and erasing the limits and borders between fiction and reality, Gréaud's projects create fluid, challenging and otherworldly experiences.

Gréaud's first solo exhibition LADI ROGEURS with Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris in the beginning of this year was conceived as a three-dimensional sketch, encompassing the entire gallery space. In the spirit of the cinematic cross-fade principle, the show in Berlin is a continuation of Paris, reconfiguring the gallery space while drawing from the codes of a still life.

Tinted in a purple, diffuse light, the space is interrupted by organically formed sculptures, Spores, hanging from the ceiling, which spread the sound frequencies of dying stars into the surrounding space. Openings in the gallery floor, filled with mud, sand rust, liquids and waste collected at the original shooting site near Tallinn of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's science fiction masterpiece Stalker (1979) pick up the film's exceptional sentiment. And MACHINE, a tree-like sculpture transforms into an autonomous entity, seemingly moving its limbs beyond any control. Thus, creating a landscape that seems to emerge from another world – a synthetic, supernatural, and disruptively unreal sphere – the installation offers a vision of a contemporary form of vanitas.