French contemporary art now - recent practice and newly emerging artists

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There can be little doubt that in recent years French contemporary art has powered its way to new international prominence, a significance which looks set to intensify as a host of emerging names begin to establish themselves as exciting newcomers to the art scene.

There's a distinctive flavour to much current French practice: conceptual with an intellectual bent, the days when the Left Bank seemed a byword for radical thought seem revivified through a wave of questioning, parameter-pushing artists - a disproportionate number of whom studied philosophy before turning to art.

While it's certainly true that, for the last decade, the French government has made concerted efforts to promote its contemporary artists internationally, the success of this venture has also nurtured local art scenes - with some extraordinary results.

Confident and progressive, current French art may well be setting the standards by which new conceptual practice will be judged for some time to come.

Etienne Chambaud

(Born 1980) An orchestrating hand is omnipresent in all works by Etienne Chambaud, yet simultaneously negated by accruals of meaning and incident beyond the formal domain of the artwork itself.

Many of Chambaud's pieces, for example, depend on the presence of a title or caption, texts which convert the works into constituents within a semantic game or philosophical conundrum.

Sans Titre (Les Titres et leur Objet) (Untitled (Titles and their Object), 2008, consists of a simple arrangement of wall-mounted fluorescent tubing. While exhibited, the title of the piece is changed daily, the series of new names recorded on a framed calendar. The work's nominal identity is thus called irresolvably into question: should it be regarded as a different piece each day?

Chambaud's series of works La Feuille Blanche (The Blank Page (2007-9), below, equally depend on their collective title for conversion into visual oxymorons. Although literally still blank, cut and reassembled concentric circles fill each sheet with new-found form.

Chambaud is far from alone in his ontological concerns which, as mentioned previously, characterise much current French art practice and are equally evident in the work of compatriots including Mark Geffriaud, Benoît Maire and Aurélien Froment (Chambaud has collaborated with both Maire and Froment).

Yet Chambaud's exploration of the nature and possibilities of art has consistently widened, leading to ever more ambitious works and a particularly expansive view of art's possibilities.

Le Stade des Sirènes (Paris, 2010, simultaneously produced in London and Rome as 'The Sirens' Stage' and 'Lo stato delle sirene' respectively) derives its title from the sirens' song of mythology, which is endlessly renewed for every listener.

Chambaud's piece likewise initiates a process of continual evolution and re-invention, a drama-in-the-making centred around a stage of named plinths collectively known as The Reef (below).

Here, actors occasionally rehearse fragments of a specially written script; Instructions, which change throughout the exhibition, outline performative actions associated with The Reef's specific components.

The show's evolution is recorded by an ever-present Copyist, who transcribes everything that is said or seen, including the arrival and movements of visitors.

Pinned to the wall, these notes form part of the sirens' song, both describing and replenishing its protean existence.

 

Benoît Maire

Like several of the artists featured here, Benoît Maire (who studied Philosophy before turning to art) concerns himself with how, why and in what states art can exist.

Typical of his practice is the 2007 workLamia, Cancelled lines following II-81 (left), which deftly describes an artefact of cultural production which liminally hovers between opposing modes of being.

Referencing the epic poem 'Lamia' by John Keats, Maire reproduces the pen strokes used by the author to cross out a long passage from his manuscript.

Alluding to ghostly verses which, in terms of Keats' published poem, exist only as a rejection, the exact moment they became a kind of non-art is captured in the crossed lines.

As a record of artistic process and revision, Maire's work reflects on an excised potentiality that still remains unofficially part of Keats' poem.

A hugely promising young artist, we cover his work in more detail in an article on new art with a philosophical or intellectual basis.

 

Isabelle Cornaro

Isabelle Cornaro is concerned with the revaluation of objects through their arrangement and juxtaposition. She examines, classifies and reconstructs meaning according to her own idiosyncratic conventions.

At first glance, the installationPaysage avec Poussin et témoins oculaires (Landscape with Poussin and Eyewitnesses, 2008, left) provides little obvious connection with the 17th century landscape painter in its assortment of oriental rugs and objects arranged on plinths.

That said, vases with floral patterns provide a semblance of foreground foliage; porcelain animals graze atop pedestals.

Viewing the meticulously planned arrangement, we may be reminded of Poussin's mission to achieve clarity of expression through classical 'disegno', an aim also highlighted here by Cornaro's carefully described perspective and the presence of optical and metrical measuring instruments within the installation.

Everyday objects that reference themselves - fish knives with fish-shaped handles or coffee spoons adorned with a bean - are another of Cornaro's fascinations, and several such items form one of her series ofHomonymes (1,2,3 and 4, 2010).

These grey plaster casts of assorted objects displayed on tablets include - besides the visual tautologies already mentioned - objects decorated in various forms of relief (left), and a selection of tools, boxes and cubic forms.

Gathered together and cast as a single mass, Cornaro aims for collective meaning above and beyond each item's individual identity.

Similar effects are sought in her video works. Film-lampe (2010) portrays an assortment of lightbulbs filmed from above, the bulbs glittering like strange jewels.

De l'argent filmé de profil et de trois quarts (Money filmed from the side and a three-quarter view, 2010) provides exactly what the title states. Shot in close-up, however, the reliefs and engraving on notes and coins take on the appearance of miniature artworks, their aesthetic rather than monetary value brought strikingly to the fore.

 

Raphaël Zarka

(Born 1977) Emerging French artist Raphaël Zarka is also a long-term skateboarder, a fact which defines much of his practice.

His documentation of man-made forms is approached largely from the skateboarder's viewpoint, a stance which offers an unorthodox and intriguing entry point into the categorisation of physical structure.

As Zarka himself puts it, "... skaters prioritize a relationship with the work rather than a mechanical relationship aesthetic. For them, all the interest of a sculpture is the variety of movements that it recommends."

The video work Cretto (2005), is filmed within a vast outdoor sculpture, a cement labyrinth located in the Sicilian countryside.

Begun (though left unfinished) by Italian artist Alberto Burri in the 1980s, the camera follows a man blinded by a bizarre brick helmet as he attempts to make his through it.

His movements document spatial form with an emphasis on navigation and negotiation, focusing, like all of Zarka's work, on the potential for dynamic mobility inherent in structures rarely designed for such a purpose.

The series of photographsRiding Modern Art (left) similarly point to a very specific appraisal of sculpture, as eleven skaters surf different examples of public sculpture. And in the 2008 Padova (top left), Zarka moves backwards in time, creating a version of an apparatus conceived by Galileo to study free-fall in a ball's descent of a slope.

Retaining the original structure's shape and dimensions, this 'documentary sculpture' reminds us how the skateboarder both defies and exploits the gravitational pull Galileo was himself investigating.

Zarka's formulation of an alternative reading of form certainly offers a unique addition to the ever-changing arena of artistic critique.

He is also one of very few artists to establish a truly viable interface between urban art and more establishment genres.

 

Tatiana Trouvé

Like many artists, Italian-born Tatiana Trouvé endured a long and arduous route to artistic recognition, a fact reflected in the body of work that eventually brought her fame.

As a graduate in the mid 1990s, the artist found herself faced with various difficulties: job and gallery rejections, a struggle to show her existing work and little finance with which to produce anything new.

Her response was to initiate the Bureau d'Activités Implicites (Office of Implicit Activities, left) a project paradoxically aimed at recording the paucity of her artistic career.

The series of 'modules' that constitute the Bureau assume the utilitarian nature of standard office environments, both aesthetically through Trouvé's adaptive use of familiar office furniture, and in terms of their specific function within a bureaucratic whole.

The first, for example, (the Module Administratif, initiated in 1997) contains a continually expanding archive of administrative documents such as CVs, proposals, rejection and acceptance letters, all accompanied by office supplies such as rubber bands and paper clips arranged on a specially designed desk.

Several Modules d'attente resemble public seating areas, yet also provide unfamiliar functionality: in one, visitors can listen to sound recordings made by Trouvé while simply waiting for various things to happen.

At the heart of the entire project, the cylindrical Module ˆ reminiscence provides a storehouse for memories recorded on slips of paper and secreted in tiny pigeonholes; its mirrored surface is designed to reflect all surrounding modules (left).

In her most recent works, Trouvé has begun to explore newer formal territories, developing interests in the demarcation of time (a theme partially expounded by the Bureau's modular histories) and oneiric intervention into architectural space.

350 points towards infinity(2009, left), is composed of dozens of metallic pendulums, frozen at various angles above the floor by magnetic forces.

Other installations, in which space is redefined by strips of brass, or viewers glimpse impenetrable corridors lined with doorways, reprise Trouvé's continual exploration of possibility; no longer purely autobiographical, but points of potential in which spectators are equally invited to participate.

 

Benjamin Swaim

(Born 1970). Benjamin Swaim is one of relatively few younger French artists working with painting and drawing.

However, like a surprisingly high percentage of the artists featured here, Swaim majored in Philosophy before turning to art, and his approach to image-making is underpinned by intellectual and conceptual enquiry, with a particular interest in psychoanalysis.

The Salammbô-Schreber series (left) draws associations between the novella by Flaubert and the autobiography of Daniel Paul Schreber (Mémoires d'un névropathe). Recounting episodes of psychosis, the Memoirs became one of the most influential books in the history of psychoanalysis, thanks largely to its interpretation by Sigmund Freud.

Swaim has stated that "What appeals to me is the mixing of the serious and the ludic, the grotesque and the tragic, beauty and ugliness...".

Such attributes are clearly apparent in his series of ink drawings Forty Guns(below), which subvert the cowboy movie genre into exaggeratedly brutal, cartoon-like vignettes. Similar techniques are used in the slightly later David and Goliath, and Swaim views both series as at least partly symbolic of an Oedipal altercation, a personal struggle with the father figure.

Freudian connotation is also suggested by the 2008-9 seriesLes sculptures de ma mre(below); grisaille abstractions which hypothetically represent a series of sculptural works his mother might have created.

 

Sophie Bueno-Boutellier

(Born 1974) Although inspired in part by theosophical texts and scientific theory, Sophie Bueno-Boutellier's installations provide intuitive response to such influences; her chosen materials - cloth, gold leaf, salt, wool, earth, ash - encouraged to resonate with symbolic meaning and operate through a conjunction of texture and form.

Less dependent on theory than many of her peers, Bueno-Boutellier seeks to create a kind of modulated poetry in which almost any reading is possible.

Her works on canvas - which she herself deems 'sort of' paintings - are similarly material in nature, the folds and creases in long-stored cloth a focal point that renders the artist's application of paint almost secondary (below).

 

Mark Geffriaud

(Born 1977) Mark Geffriaud is often cited as an artist primarily concerned with the interrogation of image, but this is not entirely the case. His eclectic body of work encompasses a broad range of investigation; of image, text and teleologies as well as modes of perception or classification.

The critiques he undertakes, however, are generally constituent in the work itself, meaning that Geffriaud provides in-built analysis of his own art's implications and potentialities.

Present Perfect (2007) consists of a series of spotlights trained on an empty gallery wall. As the work's title suggests, temporality is an essential aspect of this non-hang, pinpointing the possible location of works displayed in the past, as well as those that may be shown.

Nevertheless, as the title also punningly makes clear, the only perfect resolution is the present one, an absence which can be filled according to each spectator's ideal. Reinforcing this, a timer in the lights causes them to flicker every 15 to 50 seconds, a movement corresponding to the blinking of an eye and therefore the perception of the present moment.

Light - together with its intrinsic association of illumination and revelation - frequently makes an appearance in Geffriaud's work, generally emitted from projectors which, equally, carry their own valency as transmitter of images.

Herbarium (2007) consists of book pages framed between clear plexiglass and embedded like windows into a partition wall. Backlit by sequenced projectors, viewers intermittently see both sides of each page, a reflection on the categorisation of knowledge and what is hidden from view (the title, Herbarium, not only refers to such classification, but puns on the fact that entire 'leaves' from a book are exposed by Geffriaud's intervention).

Nevertheless, while such a display is certainly revealing, it does not necessarily tell us more in any conventionally logical way. It is left to the spectator to reconcile - or reject - this system of seeing.

A mechanised projector is also a feature of the installation Polka Dot (2008, left and top), in which a slide reproduction of the first ever photograph of the sun (1845) circles a darkened space.

Although pioneering, the image itself captures little more than a white disc, limited in terms of what it can reveal. Moving like a spotlight across posters, prints and pages from magazines, the narrative it summons forth is likewise enigmatic.

At the end of each rotation, the light is reflected by mirrors onto an open, upright book. Pinpricks in the pages allow the light to seep through to the other side, again illuminating both back and front to achieve an interconnection of printed images.

 

Nicolas Moulin

(Born 1970, lives and works in Berlin) Nicolas Moulin's multidisciplinary works provide imaginary additions to the built environment.

While frequently reprising modernist and, in particular, Brutalist form, they are often imbued with unsettling connotation at odds with the utopian ideals from which these architectures sprang.

His early works, in particular, focus on the more disturbing aspects of utilitarian concrete construction.

The photographic series VIDERPARIS (above), for example, consists of empty Parisian streets in which all buildings are sealed with concrete barriers - an apocalyptic vision of confinement reminiscent of the former Berlin Wall.

In similarly eerie fashion, the video work Nachdatch reveals the interior of a computer-generated concrete bunker, its sepulchral interior continually perforated by mysteriously shifting shafts of light.

More recently, Moulin has turned his attention to the digital creation of monumental structures inexplicably located in remote terrain, such as Temerickturndsmal(2007, left) or Bergenobliqusaml (2008 (below), as well as his own sculptural works in concrete and other construction materials.

 

Aurélien Froment

(Born 1976) Aurélien Froment's interest lies in narrative and the possibilities for its construction, an endeavour which encompasses film, installation, performance and many less easily classifiable interventions.

The film Théâtre de Poche(Pocket Theatre, 2007, left), shows a magician presenting a series of card tricks, each card bearing an image that seems to suspend itself in air.

The character of the magician is loosely based on the 1930s vaudeville artist Arthur Lloyd, also known as the 'The Human Card Index', who became famous for producing virtually any type of printed matter from his pockets on request.

The images shown here appear equally random, ranging from anatomical illustrations to buildings, film stars or animals; viewers are left to construct narrative links using their own systems of association.

Card games, sleight of hand, building blocks and thread all make frequent appearances in Froment's work, their metaphorical implications with regard to narrative construction constantly implicit, but as materials, often used to create narratives of their own.

The short video Rabbit (2009), for example, demonstrates the formation of eight different knots alongside phrases used to help memorise the steps involved ('Build a well. A rabbit comes out of the hole, circles the tree, and jumps back into the hole.')

The act of knotting or tying together is, of course, frequently used to refer to narrative technique and, in Froment's case, is also a process in which he involves his audiences to an extensive degree. Yet the knots shown in Rabbitalso generate their own mini-narratives, a dual reflection of the story-telling process.

A model of learning through a series of interactive steps was first suggested by the 19th-Century German pedagogue Friedrich Froebel, who pioneered the Kindergarten and also developed children's building blocks, a popular toy to this day. Both Froebel and his construction sets are another of Froment's common motifs.

In the 2009 work Debuilding (Case Study #8, Pacific Palisades) Froment adopts a narrative technique in which association is engendered via the confluence of seemingly unrelated historical events, an increasingly visible contemporary tendency used extensively by artists such as Ian Kaier.

An inkjet print depicting the famous Eames House in Los Angeles is accompanied by a pile of coloured building blocks.

When the Eames House was built, World War II shortages meant different elements had to be constructed using the same materials, a need which led to new developments in modular architecture. A colour chart such as those provided in Froebel's original kits maps the toy bricks to various areas of the Eames House.

The overlapping associations go further still: architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who Eames regarded as a major influence, was purported to have discovered his interest in architecture after receiving a set of Froebel building blocks as a child.

 

Damien Deroubaix

(Born 1972) Damien Deroubaix's installations, collages and drawings in various media bleakly denounce the misuse of power and control.

His world of monstrous figures and doom-laden imagery is unmistakeably apocalyptic in tone, yet also richly engaging, revealing the influence of movements from Pop Art to Dada.

Word, in the shape of slogans lifted from marketing campaigns and political propaganda, combines with image to create an alternative publicity, a graphic expression of unease and confrontation.

 

Cyprien Gaillard

One of France's best known newer contemporary artists, Cyprien Gaillard's trajectory to fame has been rapid.

Concerning himself with the legacy of modernist architecture (particularly the now largely discredited Brutalist style), Gaillard recognises its utopian failure, yet refuses to deny its aesthetic and cultural worth.

Linking the monolithic presence of the tower block to a "new Romantic order", the work of this important artist and others who similarly reflect on the modernist architectural ideal is discussed in our article on the influence of the modernist high rise.

 

Latifa Echakhch

Born in 1974 in Morocco, Latifa Echakhch grew up primarily in the French Alps. Perhaps unsurprisingly, considerations concerning identity - individual, cultural and political - are recurrent in her work, often achieved through the juxtaposition or modification of simple objects.

Echakhch's installations of Moroccan carpets are quite literally deconstructed; prised apart thread by thread until only the borders remain. Yet even when reduced to mere markings on the gallery floor, the skeletal structures remain easily recognisable, their heritage and history almost impossible to strip away.

If the borders of an unpicked carpet maintain an obstinate persistence, a crumpled page from an atlas exerts a similar presence.

Screwed into a ball - an act usually associated with discarding or negating - geographical distinctions in this case are made even more evident by the ball's similarity to a miniature globe.

While artists such as Fayçal Baghriche (next page) seek to metaphorically obliterate geopolitical difference, Echakhch sets out to highlight distinctions between the two cultural identities she inhabits.

Principe d'Economie 1 and 2 (2005), uses the common commodity of sugar to enable one such comparison. In the first work, Moroccan sugar loaves are arranged on the floor (below, left), their slender, cone-like forms a total contrast to the scattered, western-style sugar cubes that make up the second piece.

Through the simple juxtaposition of two different methods of processing sugar, Echakhch initiates a wealth of pragmatic and associative response.

As sculptural forms, the sensuous, hand-crafted loaves are offset by the pristine regulation of the cubes - the mechanised production of which also points towards technological difference.

One could even reflect on the different packing requirements each form necessitates - the cones interspersed upwards and downwards, the cubes fitting tightly together like building blocks. Looked at literally, even the act of compartmentalisation gains unexpected fluidity.

 

Fayçal Baghriche

(Born 1972) Algerian-born Fayçal Baghriche extracts wry new meaning from commonplace visual vocabulary.

His Epuration Elective (Arabic version), (2010, left) presents what appears to be a star-filled sky. Its origin, however, is a graphic compendium of the world's flags (ordered according to the Arabic alphabet).

Hidden beneath blue paint, only the stars with which many are adorned remain uncovered. The apparently celestial nature of the image contrasts tellingly with the masked symbols of nationhood and terrestrial boundary.

The world and its demarcations are again the subject ofSouvenir, (2009, left) which consists of an illuminated, motorised globe. Spinning so quickly that surface details are impossible to discern, Baghriche's earth blurs into a single entity that erases the possibility of nation.

A sombre corollary to these works, Actus Fidei (2009) is a compilation of photographic images depicting the burning of flags. Although, as the work's title suggests, the acts depicted are forms of protest, statements of faith, the totality of images represents a conflagration of apocalyptic proportions.

Not all Baghriche's work employs such a serious tone, however. The short film Philippe, (2008, below) delights in Dada-esque absurdity as it shows tourists enjoying the spectacle of a 'living statue' kitted out as Tutankhamun.

As they pose for photographs or throw tips into the basket provided, they are unaware that the unmoving figure beneath the costume really is nothing more than a statue, a plastic mannequin which Baghriche finally dismantles and carries away.

 

Adel Abdessemed

Enfant terrible and a major name in recent international art, Adel Abdessemed's practice is essentially one of confrontation, requiring a readiness - and ability - to confront often highly unpleasant truths.

A series of blackened terracotta cars (Practice Zero Tolerance 2006,) were cast directly from vehicles burnt out during the French race riots which saw over 1500 cars destroyed every night.

Axe On (2007, left) creates killing fields of flower-like clusters of knives, while an ongoing series of photographed actions such as Sept Frères (2006, below left) depicts beasts including lions, snakes or boar set loose in the streets of Paris; the feral underbelly of the City of Light made more explicit than at any time since the literary works of Zola.

Abdessemed's background is often cited as a factor in his raw and troubling view of the world.

Raised in rural Algeria, he won a place at art school, but fled the country aged just 19 when the Principal was assassinated by Islamic fundamentalists.

Several of Abdessemed's works besides Practice Zero Tolerance focus indirectly on the circumstances of the immigrant or exile: the video In Hot Blood (2008), features a Guignol-esque protagonist who rants hysterically about not being a terrorist.

In fact, Abdessemed is vituperatively critical of all three principal monotheist religions, but further reflections of the suspicion with which those of Arabic background have become associated in France and elsewhere emerge inBourek (2005), the twisted wreckage of an aeroplane.

Habibi (2004), one of Abdessemed's most famous works, establishes an even more chilling relationship between flying and death: an enormous suspended skeleton stretches its arms and legs as if in flight, propelled by a jet engine.

Although such works inescapably evoke 9/11 and contemporary fears of terrorism, they are also autobiographical, associating flight in its widest sense - an act of escape - with tragedy and personal sacrifice.

If the works described clearly strike an uneasy chord, the recent video projects Don't Trust Me (2008) and Usine(Factory) (2009) ignited such controversy when exhibited in the United States that shows including them were forced to close.

Don't Trust Me comprises six videos, each a few seconds long, depicting different animals - a sheep, a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat and a deer - slaughtered through hammer blows to the head.

The 90 second video loop Usine shows the baiting of various creatures - scorpions, snakes, tarantulas, pitbull terriers, fighting cocks - herded together in a concrete pen simply in order to attack each other.

Abdessemed's gallerists claim the footage is archival, used to express repulsion at violence while also underlining its inevitability. Detractors insist that such images are inhumane, exploitative and that their use simply cannot be justified.

Whatever position is taken, the fact that Abdessemed received death threats on account of these videos would only seem to reinforce his observation that "Birth is violent. Death is violent. Violence is everywhere."

 

Fabien Verschaere

(Born 1975) Fabien Verschaere's black and white drawings and watercolours are complemented by colourful sculptural objects which, together, evoke a world of quirky chimerae and recurring symbols dredged from the artist's fertile imagination.

Much of Verschaere's graphic work is wall-based, owing obvious allegiances to street art and mural painting. Verschaere himself has stated that "murals and graffiti are truly contextual, seen head-on, in the same place where they were created."

Simultaneously child-like and politically trenchant, Verschaere's work delights in the straightforward aim of enveloping viewers in an off-beat mythology of its own making.

 

Mathieu Mercier

Drawing inspiration from the various 20th Century European movements that sought to integrate art and design, Mathieu Mercier highlights both their successes and failures by setting up comparisons between iconic works and objects of contemporary mass production.

Drum and Bass 100% Polyester(2003, left) for example, is an arrangement of black, wall-mounted shelves and primary coloured objects that clearly resembles Mondrian's compositions from his 1942-3 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' series.

The likeness - accentuated by musical allusion in both titles - creates a space for comparison and contemplation, an intersection of past and present.

Similarly, the text work ZU (2001) hybridises fonts from two distinctive eras of design, a 1919 typeface by Theo van Doesburg, and a font created in 1979 by Edward Benguiat.

Mercier's message appears to be multi-faceted: while emphasising the longevity of historical design innovation, he also comments on its assimilation as a subject of mass production and the inevitability with which it acquires new - arguably diluted - aesthetic values.

Yet the process of change is itself of interest to Mercier, often documented through series of works which provide a kind of inventory of design evolution.Hi/Lo/No-Tech (2002), for example, consists of five grey and black perspex disks in varying sizes, each corresponding to a different generation of recording media, from 78's to LP's and CDs.

 

Boris Achour

(Born 1966) Boris Achour is not a particularly recent artist, having exhibited continually since the 1990s. However, his work continues to reward with its visual verve and lyricism.

Installation, performance and film comprise the major part of Achour's oeuvre, interests which themselves are strongly influenced by the artist's fascination with film and TV.

Accordingly, his ongoing series begun in 2006 and entitled Conatus (after the Spinozian concept outlining the driving forces of desire and mankind's will to increase its power) can be seen as a series of subtly related episodes.

Although Achour's work generally resists straightforward interpretation, it is tuned towards visual spectacle, inviting comparison with filmic sequence or set design.

Indeed, many of his installations also serve as stages for performances (recorded as movies and frequently incorporated within further installations) or as "landscapes in which the spectator meanders".

Dance is also increasingly evident: Conatus: La Nuit du Danseur (Night of the Dancer, 2009, left), was conceived for the 2009 group show 'La force de l'art 02' at the Grand Palais, Paris.

Featuring a tap dancer weaving a path between the works on show, alone at night and wearing an illuminated mask, tripping the light fantastic has rarely seemed so magical.

 

Loris Gréaud

Although still a young artist, the eclecticism and thematic complexity of Loris Gréaud's work can partly be seen as a precursor of similar tendencies in current French art.

The expansive character of his work is rooted in his own training and education: he attended the Conservatoire de Musique in Paris (although was expelled after setting up a recording studio), and also studied filmmaking and graphic design before finally turning his attention to fine art.

Despite Gréaud's abilities across a wide range of disciplines, much of his work is collaborative, partly in order to fulfil specialist requirements that push mediums to extremes.

He has worked with architects, engineers, geo-biologists, composers, perfumiers, musicians and writers.

Les Résidents (1 and 2) (2005), gives a good sense of the scale and reach of Gréaud's imaginative ambition.

The first part of the work took place in one of the oldest apartments in Paris, the space reconfigured by a team of architects and magnetic field experts to inspire unease and even physical anxiety in volunteers who opted to spend time there.

Bulletins verbally recording their experiences were disseminated via local radio, and rumours quickly spread that the flat was haunted.

For part 2, the apartment's layout was recreated in a gallery using nothing more than 'partitions' of cold air.

Insubstantial and invisible, visitors were able walk through the walls, thus becoming ghost-like themselves.

A string of equally noteworthy works followed in quick succession.

Why is a raven like a writing desk? (2006) enlisted the aid of French scientists to produce a series of miniscule nanosculptures.

Invisible to the naked eye, they could only be seen using powerful microscopes placed inside the black cabinets housing them.

Frequency of an Image (M46 EDIT) (2007) likewise invests in various technologies while also forming a prologue to Gréaud's most ambitious work to date.

Pulses of light emitted from two suspended lightbulbs provide a 'translation' of a brain scan taken while the artist was ruminating on the forthcoming project.

Other versions of the work include a floor that vibrates to the rhythms of Gréaud's mind (above).

While impressive, neither work is fully able to convey the extravaganza that the project - Celador (2008) - would become.

Its central element, a specially commissioned opera (relayed from Spore Speakers that pulsate light and emit resinous goo as well as sound, left), relates the story of a studio in which all creative potential is concentrated: "... a vast workshop distended in space and time."

The work's simultaneous production (in Paris' Palais de Tokyo and London's ICA) revealed the full extent of Gréaud's baroque imagination.

Identical triplets served black champagne; in London, sliding doors connected a mise-en-abîme of near identical rooms, while in Paris, 'bubbles' contained a series of discrete though concomittant works.

These ranged from a movie that stopped playing whenever would-be spectators approached, to La Bulle Forêt de poudre à canon (The Gunpowder Forest Bubble): trees coated with explosives and located perilously close to propane gas-filled fluorescent tubes (top, left).

Gréaud's vision of a vision, "not so much a 'Dream Factory' as a 'Dreaming Factory'", certainly counts as one of the most spectacular of recent art events.

There's a point, however, at which such work becomes overweening, too reliant on vast budgets and technological wizardry.

Gréaud may represent the lavish apex of recent French art, but its newly emerging practitioners are more austere and circumspect, both in their practice and thought