The installation at La Maison Rouge in Paris
La Maison Rouge - Gregor Schneider until 18 May
www.lamaisonrouge.org
Get in line and wait to be alone. Schneider's installation, the talk of the town, functions by subjecting you, anxious from waiting, to the blankness of a blank environment. The steel clad space hinted occasionally with a scent (the installation's title literally translates from the German to 'sweet smell') becomes your only primary thought. It's scary and gets scarier on reflection. Come one, come all a harrowing experience to be had by all... Nazi gas chambers? Meet the anti-Christoph Büchel who instead of filling space with detritus, fills the Maison Rouge with emptiness...
Loris Greaud, installation view
Palais de Tokyo - Loris Greaud until 27 April
www.palaisdetokyo.com
Something brewing, incubating, hatching, sprouting... Standing at the brink of each room of the show, the viewer walks through space, a matrix like zone where architectural models come to life in photos, drawings, projections, and suspended neon. In one memorable room amongst a barren wasteland of 'fake plastic trees' a vending machine offers tasteless candy. Eerier than the frontier of time-space continuum, Greaud is proud of fostering projects that bloom plots, and sub-plots, and sub-sub-plots. The most ambitious exhibition ever mounted by the Palais de Tokyo, which will travel in altered versions to London, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Candida Höfer, Bibliotheque Mazarine, Paris, 2007
Yvon Lambert - Candida Höfer until 5 April
www.yvon-lambert.com
Höfer unfurls her latest large-scale photographs continuing her stylishly de rigeur typological experiment. This time they are historic interiors of Paris, so lush they seem painted by her camera. Barren images of museums, libraries and palaces, none of which shed a tear for their past grandeur.
Shirin Neshat, 'Faezeh & Amir Khan', 2008
Ink on C-print mounted on aluminum
Galerie Jerome de Noirmont - Shirin Neshat until 5 April
www.denoirmont.com
The Iranian-born artist famed for her photographs overlaid with handwritten Arabic and stultifying video installations has released two installments, 'Munis' and 'Faezeh' based on Women Without Men, a novel by the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur.
Liam Gillick
Air de Paris - Liam Gillick until 17 May
www.airdeparis.com
The show by and large reminds one that Gillick was born the bastard child of Judd and Lewitt. The writing on the wall may try to persuade you otherwise, but, well, why hide your bloodline when it's so unabashedly colorful?
Olivier Sévère
Galerie Baumet Sultana - Olivier Sévère until 5 April
www.galeriebaumetsultana.com
Ever since Apelles painted a deceptively real bunch of grapes artists have played upon verisimilitude. Sévère makes often mundane objects out of whimsically perverse media: casting flotation devices in bronze, sculpting bars of soap in veined marble, forming bricks in recycled wood, blowing a bowling ball and alley pins in transparent glass.
Anri Sala, 'Air Cushioned Ride,' 2006
Video colour and sound
Galerie Chantal Crousel - Anri Sala until 19 April
www.crousel.com
Based on the experiencing of driving through Arizona listening to Baroque music flicker through the radio, Anri Sala made the video 'Air Cushioned Ride' (2006). He was fascinated how the radio signal cut out to play country music when he circled around a group of trucks. He had this recording transcribed for a baroque trio and country band in second work called "A Spurious Emission" (2007). The cacophonic results of recreating sound in a specific time and location offer a meditation on the artificiality of art making.
Olivier Babin, installation view
Galerie Frank Elbaz - Olivier Babin until 5 April
www.galeriefrankelbaz.com
A bundle of newspapers tied with string as solidly black as the ink used to print their obscured text, cartons of chicken eggs blackened in a post-apocalyptic guise.... These are ideas dead before they are alive. Catch phrases with double meanings such as "Time after Time" and "It's about time" are painted in white text on small pitch-black canvases, a guise familiar to those who know On Kawara's conceptual puns.
Wilfrid Almendra, '5.1.', 2008
86.61 x 59.06 x 76.77 inches
Cosmic Galerie - Wilfrid Almendra until 19 April
www.cosmicgalerie.com
Almendra makes slick, anthropomorphic sculptures based on a mix of images culled from the internet and his imagination. A standout work, '5.1', is a lacquered bouquet of trumpet like forms set against a series of black hypnotic lines.
Xavier Veilhan
Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin - Xavier Veilhan until 26 April
www.galerieperrotin.com
Xavier Veilhan's menagerie of crystalline animals and figures have populated the blankness of many a white cube. As if struck by the petrifying gaze of Medusa as they disembarked from Noah's ark, men, women, birds of flight and fancy are frozen in colorful stances.
Steve Pulimood was educated at Columbia University in New York City. He is a doctoral candidate at Oxford researching the anatomy studies of Leonardo da Vinci, and preparing a book on that topic. He lives in Paris.
)
)
)