Paris, France — It is a mystical and mysterious feast for the five senses that is being played out in the Petit Palais, a palatial-like building built in 1900 and housing the city’s Museum of Fine Arts. But each year it opens its doors to a contemporary artist and this year, Loris Gréaud, artist, architect, filmmaker,  has created an astounding and astonishing show that wends its way through the galleries and great ground floor garden and inner courtyard of the edifice. Nuits Corticales, or Cortical Nights offers up mysterious sculptures and installation works that reach out to our eyes and ears. Cortical implies the outer layer of an organ. 

The Petit Palais itself is the centerpiece of the exhibition, its facade comes alive at night with an eye-catching luminous work. Meanwhile Gréaud dialogues with the museum’s permanent collection in the sculpture gallery, for example, where the plasterwork of the sculptures is juxtaposed with his musical angels. Some sing, another calls upon the sense of smell, an olfactory work that is based on the molecules that are thought to form the basis of the universe. The stunning garden in the round of the museum plays host to a magical installation work made up of tiny living creatures Physarum polycephalum, micro-organisms known as blobs, created here through special effects, and which in science are used as a model organism for research into cells and the cell cycle. Loris Gréaud’s blobs instill life into the heart of the Petit Palais’ glorious garden. 

« Loris Gréaud’s work is also characterized by the blurring of boundaries between fiction and reality, the process of immersing visitors in a total experience in which they appear to be projected into a film, whilst simultaneously being brought as close to reality as possible. This dimension takes on a very special form in the garden, where the blob farm owes its survival to special effects borrowed from cinematographic techniques; and where sounds from all over the world, transmitted to the Petit Palais, offer the visitor the attainment of an impossible ubiquity, » comments the Petit Palais’ chief curator and the exhibition’s curator Juliette Singer. 

These made-to-measure works, including a rendition of a pangolin, the quirky-looking Asian mammal that was once believed to have been at the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic, are outfitted into the Petit Palais, a building designed by Charles Girault for the 1900 World’s Fair exhibition. It is a showcase for arts and crafts with its floor mosaics, painted ceilings, a cupola decorated by the great artist and art critic Maurice Denis one of the founder’s of the Nabis group, stained glass windows, and columned garden in the round. Here a café serving light meals and beverages offers an excellent viewpoint onto the ponds, shrubs and trees that Loris Gréaud has instilled with his magical installation works. The permanent fine art collections of the Petit Palais as well as the temporary exhibition are free of charge. Cortical Nights is on show until January 14th. ©Trish Valicenti for The Gourmet Gazette. https://www.petitpalais.paris.fr/en