© Aurélie Cenno
Exhibition Inside at the Palais de Tokyo
06/11/2014
Web culture dictates brevity, even though we’d like to describe this exhibition in greater detail because of its audacious approach and the strong impression it leaves on visitors. So, in short: it’s an amazing exhibition!
Stéphane Tidet, sans titre, Le refuge, 2007 © Aurélie Cenno
The visitors are just as much a part of this exhibition as the works—but what really matters is that the whole experience leaves you feeling uplifted. Why? Not merely because it is ‘great’, in the same way that you might feel uplifted after seeing a really good, but harsh film, while, of course, you might feel disappointed after being subjected to a poor, but light-hearted film. And not just because the exhibition is entertaining, despite its rawness: suspended above the hall, visitors make their way through the translucent innards conceived by Numen/For Use, cross Eva Jospin’s forest, participate in Marcius Galan’s illusion of an inexistent glass barrier, and become enclosed behind another—belonging to Valia Fetisov—that takes them by surprise; and visitors are drenched by the pouring rain inside Stéphane Thidet’s Refuge.
But what is really uplifting goes well beyond these physical experiences. It’s the realisation that—compared with the nightmarish works by Boltansky, Reynolds Reynoldfs, Patrick Jolley, and Artur Zmijewski—‘Inside’, which represents the terrain ridden with regrets, failures, fears, love, and sadness that constitutes everyone’s inner landscape, is a far more upbeat experience. Your professional, financial, and family problems, and your disillusion about others and about yourself (the worst kind) are apparently insignificant, like an untroubled river, compared to what your contemporaries are going through, to judge by the work of the artists brought together and commissioned by Jean de Loisy and Ariane de Beauvais, the exhibition curators. And then, at both the end and beginning of exhibition, there is the spirit of Jean-Michel Alberola and his colours and poetry: the exit lies inside the visitor. The light is within the tunnel, in oneself: you just need to believe in this and seek it.
Exhibition ‘INSIDE’, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, from 20 October 2014 to 11 January 2015.
With the support of the Louis Roederer Foundation