Loris Gréaud*Cortical:Smoke+Mirrors

A nocturnal projection transforms Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead into a cinematic apparatus exploring surveillance, perception, and the afterlife of an unseen exhibition.

Centered on a multichannel film, the project draws from footage captured inside the closed 2020 retrospective of Christo and Jeanne-Claude at the Centre Pompidou during France’s first COVID-19 lockdown. Filmed using night-vision surveillance technology in the complete absence of visitors, Gréaud’s work transforms this “phantom exhibition” into a spectral, cinematic experience, adopting the visual language of nocturnal observation and contemporary image-making. The resulting film reveals an unseen dimension of the original show, capturing the aura of artworks suspended in time and devoid of human presence.
Developed through a multi-year collaboration with international institutions—including the Petit Palais (Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris), the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève, and the Théâtre du Châtelet—Cortical: Smoke + Mirrors is part of Gréaud’s ongoing Cortical cycle. Projected through the windows of the Mobile Homestead, the work reverses interior and exterior space, transforming the house into a luminous viewing device and the city itself into an audience.
Blending film, architecture, and urban space, the installation explores visibility and concealment, memory and mediation, proposing the exhibition as a perceptual system where images, technologies, and environments converge.

Events

FRIDAY, APRIL 3, 6PM
OPENING: LORIS GRÉAUD*CORTICAL:SMOKE+MIRRORS

MONDAY, APRIL 6, 5:30PM
LORIS GRÉAUD: WOODWARD LECTURE SERIES

About the artist

Since the early 2000s, Loris Gréaud has been following an atypical trajectory on the international contemporary art scene. He produces unique environments whose narrative is fraught with paradoxes and its linearity often troubled by disruptive elements. Rumours, poetry, viruses, architecture and demolition, academism and self-negation are all regularly invoked in his work, which strives to bring together physical and mental spaces on a single surface.

Gréaud has held numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Palais de Tokyo, Musée du Louvre, Centre Pompidou, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the ICA London, Kunsthalle Wien, Tel Aviv Museum of Art… and his works are part of prestigious international collections such as, le Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Collection François Pinault (Venise); Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), Nam June Paik Art Center (Korea) or Hirshhorn Museum (Washington).

Loris Gréaud×Cortical:Smoke+Mirrors is made possible through the support of Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, in part by Teiger Foundation and Institut Français. Additional support has been provided by Centre Pompidou.