Laurent Grasso
Through a variety of media, including video, photography, painting, neon and sound installations, Laurent Grasso produces a series of works that are brought to life through the staging of his exhibitions. Labyrinthine wanderings, architectural installations and electrical or acoustic effects induce a loss of bearings, a sense of imbalance and a sense of disorientation in the viewer – effects sought by the artist, whose work has retained a mysterious quality since his early days.
In Mes actrices (1999), he films young women on the street or on the underground without their knowledge, using cinematic or advertising clichés to transform these anonymous heroines into potential fictional characters, whilst in Soyez les bienvenus (1999) a camera rotates in slow motion around a crowd gathered in a circle, observing an action that is never revealed.
Laurent Grasso constructs his images out of a sense of absence; starting with real-life situations, he reinterprets them to distance himself from any documentary dimension. The history of science, as well as that of scientists (Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell, Jeremy Bentham), provides the artist with a rich repertoire of forms, motifs and themes, on a par with literary and cinematic fiction, astronomy, mythology and ancestral fears.
HAARP is an antenna array inspired by the military base of the same name located in Gakona, Alaska. A spectacular installation, this structure – built like a forest of wires and antennas – resembles a power station, a veritable science-fiction object. Horn Perspective is a scaled-down replica of the Horn antenna, which first detected the fossilised noise of the Big Bang in the 1960s and whose shape is reminiscent of a camera obscura or a projection chamber. Film is his medium of choice; Laurent Grasso’s films are like long, mesmerising tracking shots across urban landscapes (Radio Ghost), desert landscapes (On Air) or seascapes (The Silent Movie).
Laurent Grasso also practises painting. Playing with the interplay of past, present and future, the artist introduces anachronistic elements – sometimes referencing his own video works – into a series of paintings whose style and technique are inspired by the Flemish and Italian masters of the Renaissance. Subtle and disorienting, *Studies into the Past* contributes to Laurent Grasso’s ambition to create a ‘false historical memory’.
