Dear Shaded Viewers,
Two Paris landmarks are lending Jérémy Pradier-Jeauneau their walls this week, and they could not be more different: one is stone that has stood since Napoleon, the other is paper so thin it turns light into something you can touch.
Tonight, at 7 p.m., La Tempête opens to the public at the Arc de Triomphe. A few blocks away at the Hôtel de la Marine on Place de la Concorde, a group of French designers puts hanji — the Korean mulberry-fiber paper that craftsmen have made by hand for a thousand years — through paces it was never meant to survive. Pleated, braided, thickened into forms that no longer read as paper at all. The show is called Hanjimania, curated by Catherine Lurault and An KangEun to mark 140 years of diplomatic ties between France and Korea, and it reads less like a trade fair than a conversation conducted in material rather than language. Pierre Yovanovitch, Constance Guisset, Aline Asmar d’Amman, Studio KO and Harry Nuriev each took a turn with it. So did Pradier-Jeauneau, whose sculptural piece was realized with Atelier Foh in Korea — a fact he seems genuinely moved by, the collaboration mattering to him as much as the object it produced.
It is a smaller gesture than what he is doing a few blocks away, but perhaps the more telling one. At the Arc de Triomphe, where La Tempête has just opened, he has become only the third person given carte blanche inside the monument — after Victor Hugo and Christo, which is not a comparison most artists would survive, let alone invite. His answer to that pressure was to go looking for the building’s own unfinished business: the crown Chalgrin drew nearly two centuries ago and never got to build. Visitors now climb through historic salons toward a terrace that has not been open to the public since 1836, past abstract sculpture, scent, sound, glass and hand-worked textiles, in what amounts to a slow argument that a monument can still be unfinished, still be asked new questions.
Put the two projects side by side and what stands out isn’t scale but temperament. La Tempête is Pradier-Jeauneau alone with two centuries of French stone, deciding what belongs at the top of it. Hanjimania is Pradier-Jeauneau as one voice in a room, working someone else’s material by someone else’s rules, evidently glad to be there — “a real joy,” in his own words, to stand alongside that particular crew. Most artists having the kind of week he is having would lead with the Arc de Triomphe and mention the group show in passing. He does the opposite, and it tells you something more useful about him than either exhibition does on its own: that scenography, for him, is less about authorship than about hospitality — building the room so that someone else’s craft, or history’s, can be seen properly.
La Tempête opens tonight at the Arc de Triomphe at 7 p.m. and continues through October 4. Hanjimania opens tomorrow, September 10, at the Hôtel de la Marine from 7:30 p.m., running through the 20th (on view through the 27th).
Later,
Diane
