Eva Jospin, Grottesco @ Grand Palais

Eva Jospin, Grottesco
Installation view @ Grand Palais

Eva Jospin's solo exhibitioin, Grottesco at the Grand Palais is like no other. It is mesmerizing, amazing, and beguiling all at once. Jospin creates worlds, otherworlds, from cardboard, embroidery, shells, beads, and other delicate materials. The typical way to describe Jospin's work is that she creates forests, but there is something more going on here. The creations may be forests, but they are also like lost, forgotten planets. In some of them, it is as though the ocean was once there, but over time, has dried up, or moved elsewhere. The cardboard creations are like the remnants of a landscape left behind after a millennium of erosion through weathering. In this sense, they are ruins, complete with wild plants growing—plants made out of cardboard—as the only signs of life. But then, we see a hole, or an arch, tiny seashells crusting its (cardboard) contours, and we wonder if something might be living inside?

Eva Jospin, Promontoire, 2024

For all of the shapes and strata, steps and structures created through cardboard, we lose sight of the material. Even though it is everywhere. Cardboard is left behind in our minds as we wander through these mysterious wonderlands. The highly flammable and vulnerable material is forgotten as we look at structures in which we are not simply reminded of towers of babel, river beds, sinewy overgrown onetime riverbeds, and even a pantheon. We actually see them.

Eva Jospin, Duomo, fragment

Everything that these mythical creations are, they are also not. At the same time that they are not quite forests, they are also like forests. One thing I really enjoyed about the exhibition was how people were able to wander in and around the exhibits. In spite of their fragility, people walked inside, moved up close enough to examine the threads wrapped around a pylon, or the shells dotting a ceiling. And once there, up close, in tight with the works, we cannot help but be amazed at the incredible workmanship in each piece. The ability to transform an everyday packaging material into something so exquisite left me awestruck. Of course, Jospin is not the first artist to use cardboard, but the detail and the transformation into something unrecognizeable makes these works unique.

Eva Jospin, Diorama, 2025

Jospin refers to her works as dioramas. Pleasure gardens, or espaces de folie, resembling both the Greek Nymphaeum and the 19th century diorama. They are not only about the past, but they engage with something on the edge of the present; and they are simultaneously forward thinking. Their likeness to dioramas means that they also invite movement. Certainly, people kept moving around the works, not just in close, but in the case of the Duomo, a space into which we are invited to enter, we go in, move from wall to wall, falling into the world that might be an underground or underwater excavation, or equally belong to another planet. The movement in and around the works is part of them, and their invitation inside ushers us into another world.

Lastly, it must not be overlooked that Jospin's exhibition is next door to Claire Tabouret's designs, sketches, and plans for the new windows in Notre Dame Cathedral. Though the two exhibitions may seem to have little in common, the fact that both are creating mythical, mysterious, otherworldly spaces that draw attention to centuries of devotion, makes them comfortable neighbours in this latest installment at the Grand Palais. 

Clair-Obscur @ Bourse de Commerce

 

Peter Huyghe, Camata, 2024

Pierre Huyghe's video installation, Camata, 2024 fills the gallery beneath the Bourse cupola for the latest exhibition. Set in the Chilean Atacama desert, the film watches as three solar-powered mechanical arms move around a skeleton from the early twentieth century left lying on the desert floor. Cameras are placed on each arm, one moving on a semi-circular track around the skeleton, one outside the track simply observing, and one inside, probing, peering, and engaging with the skeleton and various glass balls, amulets, and a mirror. Of particular fascination is the film's editing which is done in real time by an AI algorithm. When Camata was shown in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the algorithm was determined by human movement within the exhibition space, but it was unclear if this was also the case in Paris. In addition to being mesmerizing to watch as mechanical arms move around, in and out of close up, themselves fascinated by the skeleton, Camata creates sophisticated dialogues between technology and human, life and death, processes of surveillance and objectification. Similarly, given the age of the skeleton and its enigmatic story, human time is thrust into tension with technological time in the film. A discourse on celestial time also emerges as we watch day turn into night through changing light in the sky, the appearance of stars, and the waxing and waning of sun and moon. Added to these already complex times is the seeming unpredictability of the editing created by algorithms. In keeping with Huyghe's concern for the inexplicable, for the blurring of boundaries between machine and human, Camata sits somewhere between science fiction and a scary reality in which machines very quickly take on human qualities. 

Sigmar Polke, Axial Age, 2005-2007

Also challenging boundaries between human and celestial, as well as having interesting things to say about time, is Sigmar Polke's cycle Axial Age. The installation consists of nine panels made with varying techniques and media from Antiquity through contemporary, including acrylics and toxic, artificial pigments. The result are a series of transparent panels resembling discoloured stain glass windows, "graffitied" by time. The panels bring to mind sacred images, speaking to an era that has been desecrated, and simultaneously, rescued from the dustbins of history.

Philippe Parreno, La Quinta del Sordo, 2021

Philippe Parreno recreates Goya's black paintings in, La Quinta del Sordo, 2021, a film that underlines the darkness of Goya's paintings. As the camera moves into tight closeup, the viewer feels intimately connected to the melancholy faces and the frescoed works. Sound is key to Parreno's re-presentation, as the environment of the recreated space dominates the soundtrack. We hear mechanical sounds, crying, light gurgling water, moaning. Once again, the past (images) and the present (sounds) come together on these sensuous walls, seen lovingly through Pareno's camera. As the film progresses, the light changes, becomes progressively brighter until the camera and light together remove the images and reduce the paintings to surfaces. Then we see shadows of leaves from a tree outside a window falling on an abstract painting. Parreno's film was actually one of the only ones in the exhibition which is directly and obviously about light and darkness, as it quite literally brings the ghosts of the past out of the shadows, into the light of the present. 

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1991

Robert Gober, Untitled, 1990 

I was also thrilled to see a few pieces by Robert Gober in the first floor galleries as he is not an artist that we often see in Europe. Gober's unique installations of amputated limbs, in the case of those on display here, trapped in a suitcase, descending in a glass case are always emotionally moving, and simultaneously, somewhat scarey. A work in beeswax and human hair shows a pillow merged with a torso, one side a man, the other a woman. The disfiguratioin of both bodies and objects, the loss of boundaries between the two, making the piece surreal, and provocative. Gober's surreal objects show the sad, desperate deformation of humanity. 

Alina Szapocznikow, Fiancé folle blanche, 1971

There were lots of other works in the exhibition, many of which I could and would love to write about here if space permitted. But I will just mention the few pieces by Alina Szapocznikow, a Polish sculpture whose work was new to me. Szapocznikow made incredibly powerful depictions of women's entrapment and enchainment to male sexuality. A work such as Fiancé folle blanche, is reminiscent of a small statuette that could be placed on a wedding cake. For all its critique of heterosexual relations, the woman is as happy in her naked pose with a penis as her support, as the penis is happy with her embrace. There is no sense in which the woman is a victim to the male organ. But still, we can't help wondering if she had any choice.

Clair-Obscur is another sprawling exhibition loosely cohered around a theme that itself moves from clarity to obscurity across three floors and a range of media at the Bourse de Commerce. And like previous of the Pinault collection's themed exhibitions, Clair-Obscur contains some exceptionally strong works and others that pale, mainly due to their uncertain relevance to the exhibition. Similarly, because a number of the films are long, and reveal themselves over time, it is an exhibition that is difficult to appreciate in one visit. That said, the richness of some of the works make for a rewarding few hours.