The gallery is delighted to current Dans La Lumière, JR’s fourth exhibition at Perrotin Paris and his thirteenth with Perrotin.The exhibition presents a sequence of current artworks impressed by the CHIROPTERA venture – a novel ballet efficiency devised by JR, Damien Jalet, and Thomas Bangalter – created specifically for the Opéra de Paris in November 2023.
In his Pure Historical past, Pliny the Elder recounts an historic Greek legend concerning the origins of artwork. The younger Corinthian Kora, daughter of the potter Butades of Sicyon (Dibutade), is saddened to see her beloved go away and desires to protect his reminiscence perpetually. Utilizing the sunshine of a lantern, she traces the define of his shadow on her wall. Her father then fashions the face in clay and bakes it with hearth. Collectively, they produce the primary portraits in historical past, in two dimensions by capturing the silhouette and in three dimensions by making a life-size sculpture. The murals thus replaces the fabric actuality of a human being, their reminiscence, and their ghost, which could come to hang-out us. From that time on, artwork is ready to conjure up actuality, time, and house.
This story is paying homage to Plato’s extra well-known “Allegory of the Cave” in Ebook VII of The Republic. Right here, human beings have been chained in a cave since delivery. With their backs turned to the surface world and its pure gentle, they solely see the shadows on the wall (as soon as once more) of all the things that passes earlier than the cave’s entrance. They assume they understand actuality when, in reality, they solely see its projection. This textual content distinguishes a world under – sunless, darkish, chaotic, and stuffed with hallucinations, illusions, and falsehoods – from a world above – luminous, harmonious, organized, and stuffed with data, readability, and reality.
In each worlds, it’s a matter of sunshine and shadow, however above all, of perspective and gaze. In different phrases, gentle will be discovered inside darkness, supplied we direct our minds and imaginative and prescient in direction of its supply, in direction of the origin of all issues. That is exactly what’s at stake in JR’s venture Retour à la caverne, Act I & II, created particularly for the Opéra Garnier in Paris in autumn 2023. In September, for Act I, the artist reworked the scaffolding overlaying the façade of the cultural monument right into a stone cave entrance that confronted the Avenue de l’Opéra. The black-and-white trompel’oeil was so practical that it might have simply deceived some passers-by into pondering that the constructing’s restoration work had unearthed a geological cave inside Charles Garnier’s structure.
In November, for Act II, the cave didn’t shut in on itself however as a substitute revealed its level of origin, the supply of its identification and existence. Its outer wall was coated with human handprints, like these in cave artwork. On Sunday, November 12, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, over twenty-five thousand spectators gathered on the Place de l’Opéra, every bringing a lightweight supply to light up what was about to unfold earlier than their dazzled eyes: CHIROPTERA, a novel ballet efficiency devised by JR, Damien Jalet, and Thomas Bangalter. The efficiency started with the putting shadow of principal ballerina Amandine Albisson, creating contours so intense and highly effective that even Kora and Butades of Sicyon would have been unable to seize them. Then, 153 dancers from throughout Europe, swirling like bats, reworked the scaffolding right into a display of large pixels, alternating between darkish and reflective sides. On the finish, the 30-meter-high kaleidoscope conveyed this message to the world: “Darkness holds the grace of the sunshine.”
This distinctive occasion will dwell lengthy within the viewers’s reminiscence, remembered as a second of togetherness, unforgettable pictures, actions, sounds, lights, feelings, vibrations, and optimistic energies. The dancers’ (or bats’) distinctive black-and-white outfits both absorbed or mirrored the sunshine from the headlamps or smartphones held by the viewers within the darkness of the evening. Every spectator illuminated their neighbor. Every was distinctive, and all had been complementary. Every had their very own identification, and so they all fashioned the group of the world.
For the exhibition devoted to this venture at Perrotin Paris, it was not solely crucial to provide particular works but additionally to discover a mode of illustration that may convey the depth felt by those that had been current on the occasion. Along with movies and photographic prints displaying the assorted moments of CHIROPTERA, JR additionally experimented with an unprecedented fusion of a number of singular strategies: photograph switch strengthened with black ink on wooden with hand-drawn charcoal highlights. L’Ombre de la caverne recreates the balletic interaction between Amandine Albisson and her shadow. The Génome sequence exhibits fowl’s eye views of the completely different configurations created by the 153 dancers on the thirty-meter-high scaffolding, whereas Chromosome options close-up photographs.
The Dans la lumière sequence focuses on their radiant silhouettes, symbolizing the liberation of the chained prisoners from Plato’s Cave and their tough however triumphant return to the sunshine. That is strengthened by means of wooden as a base, alluding to the boundaries that enclose and conceal city development websites, the graffiti that always covers them – a very unruly city artwork – and the rebirth of life symbolized by seen veins and cracks within the wooden.
“You possibly can’t banish darkness with darkness,” JR instructed me. But, every of us can come out of “our” cave, go away the shadows, and embrace the sunshine all of us carry inside us. What can we do concerning the darkness on the planet? Develop into the luminous protagonists of the world all of us share… —Marc Donnadieu