Philippe Parreno

The Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia is displaying a whole new installation by French artist Philippe Parreno. The new installation continues this story and the enduring development of the microorganisms. While the walls are covered in a phosphorescent yellow wallpaper patterned with black irises, a grand luminous marquee, reinventing those that once stood on top of cinema entrances, floats above a large vertical mechanical mirrored shutter. An experimental hybrid digital programme controls these interdependent elements, causing light to appear or disappear at irregular intervals by rotating the louvres and forcing pulses of air or synthetically generated sounds, all echoing the microorganisms’ reactions integrated in the programme. As the louvres move, the mirror reflects silhouettes of viewers and the structure of the marquee. When the light turns out, all shapes become ghostlike, accentuated by the phosphorescent walls mutating to dark green and black. Far from their initial utilitarian nature, the elements take on a playfully equivocal identity, bringing the pulse of life into the space and building a singular interaction between the viewer and the context.

With his new piece Parreno creates an experience where memory of the past comes together in a disruptive temporality with the present and future, evoking the parallel realities dear to the artist. The familiar markers of perception are annihilated in favour of a stimulating process of inventing new ways of understanding, defying rational categories and the established order.