Laurent Grasso: Paramuseum

Laurent Grasso is holding a solo exhibition “Paramuseum” at the Palais Fesch, Ajaccio. Challenging the codes of museography, the artworks will be transformed into apparitional manifestations of the “gaze” to explore the magnetism of customary objects of desire.
Laurent Grasso, born in 1972, specialized in sculptures, paintings, photographs and films. He won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2008 and he was resident at the Villa Medici in 2004.

Fascinated by how the different manifestations of power can affect our conscience, the artist attempts to capture the invisible revealing the hidden side of what we usually perceive.
Tables specially designed to isolate the exposure on a silver background looks borrowed characters from the collection. They establish an indirect dialogue with the paintings hanging by Laurent Grasso in the portrait gallery. Other figures from the collection are reflected in the works of the artist, like so many ghostly specters appear on a photographic film.
And the Imperial Napoleonic pattern is revealed in a collision in connection with power. The symbolic and practical dimension of power, seen as a magnetic force is represented in a room devoted to the Vatican and to the aesthetics of the papal power.
Unique works of the museum, especially out of the reserves, including ancient landscapes not yellowed over time and lit by neon lights, accentuate the fantasy of this reinvented museum.
Laurent Grasso offers a strange, disturbing atmosphere by manipulating the works as so many living beings, presences, ghosts – such anonymous spectators peering environment and the viewer.
The exhibition draws on the perspective of games and interconnecting the top floor of the museum, evoking a loft plunged in darkness …