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.