Galerie Perrotin, Paris is pleased to present a first solo show by Laurent Grasso, featuring a device of forty works made specially for the occasion.

With “Soleil Double,” Grasso develops one of the founding concepts of his work: the real is twofold. To see the truth, we must look for its mysterious side. Drawing on his personal reading of Michel Foucault, Grasso transforms objects into subjects in an almost cinematic scenario. Each work functions as a block of reality identified in the collective unconscious and is made strange by subtle alterations. The confrontation of this common reality with deliberately staged anachronisms creates a zone of instability were the mind can wander in time. The encounter with these manipulated objects thus give rise to a feelingof general uncertainty, something almost magical.

In this new exhibition, bringing together different periods, places and familiar registers, Laurent Grasso explores two fundamentals of our human condition: our relation to time and power, especially the power of images.

With oil paintings on panels reminiscent of Flemish and Italian primitives, neons with messages and paradoxical drawings, display cases filled with real fragments of comets, ancient books (including Galileo), Grasso disorients time, diffracts it, multiplies it, and places us “devant le temps” (before time) facing these precise, rare, unprecedented images. The time of catastrophes, wars, false miracles - everything is put back into the orbit of methodical doubt with at the centre of the script, these strange, off-track, “subjectified” figures that are a double sun, portraits of prophets, crowds at Fatima waiting for an appearance in a trance-like state, and an erupting volcanic island filmed by a drone as if a weapon, or landscapes in which the skies are streaked with the traces of comets. “These comets that punctuate the works, from Studies into the Past up to astronomical observations from the Vatican, via Galileo, bring an end to the homogenous, linear time associated with the West. These phenomena observable in different parts of the planet open onto parallel histories of multiple modernities experienced by globally interconnected peoples, or people that have yet to come together.”

Inspired by anthropologists such as Bruno Latour and the idea that catastrophes represent the final threshold in regenerative revolutions, Grasso sees his art as an instrument of research and knowledge.

The emotional impact from the bipolar zones engendered by each work support his questions. How do we understand the world and its forces through its representations? What devices underpin scientific, religious or aesthetic power? Is the dominator not the person who sees best, studies and owns the most advanced representation of reality? The artist leaves us a choice: what is the meaning of the image of this bishop with a giant astronomical telescope taken from the Vatican archives? What is the symbolic input of these two suns in brushed brass that greet visitors to the exhibition? Is this the iconography of a miracle or the sign of a catastrophe?

With these dialectical images, which are by essence troubled, even paranoid, the artist is encouraging the receiver to try a new mental experiment. He hybridizes both forms and spatio-temporal signs, as in his major show at Jeu de Paume in 2012, when architecture, sound and silence were interwoven to form a “cinematic epic.”

For his exhibition at Galerie Perrotin, Grasso has created a new apparatus with several scripts, leaving visitors free to write their own imaginary drama, to screw up their eyes and understand this “Soleil Double” (Double Sun)...