CFL

2004 - Installation (Installation)

Loris Gréaud

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The acronym “CFL” stands for an existing light standard (Compact Fluorescent Light) as well as a standard nutrient (Cognitive Fooding Laboratory). “CFL” is a mobile laboratory for growth of watercress shoots which contain high levels of anthocyanin – a natural pigment used by fighter pilots to increase their visual acuity at night in order to achieve better responses to light stimuli. In the work Celador, a taste of illusion (2007), the viewer is invited to consume the plants – a candy with the flavor of illusion. “CFL,” which refers to a possibility of better viewing in the dark, was made alongside Dream machines which consists of light boxes to see with closed eyes. These inventions blend biochemistry, science fiction, and parapsychology. “The artist’s taste for fiction, scripts, playing with fears, fantasies and obsessions herein, exemplifies a quest for a work which only exists by rumors,” critic Marjolaine Lévy has stated.

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Research by Loris Gréaud is pieced together in the exhibition space in effort to build a total work of art and a world view. “Cellar Door,” his solo exhibition held at the Palais de Tokyo in 2008, is constructed like a movie set, spanning across divergent processes and temporalities. Gréaud’s work, extracted from science fiction literature, technology, and science, questions immateriality as well as the real and the virtual. He is known to make references to Yves Klein in “The Merzball Pavilion” (2008), to spread the smell of the planet Mars in “Spirit” (2005), to remodel an apartment magnetic fields specialist in “Residents 1” (2005), to send messages in Morse code by light in “Limen” (2003), and create nanosculptures with “Untilted01” (2006). The artist does not make the invisible visible, but instead makes the invisible readable. “These notions of invisibility and off-screen non-presence are engines of desire” Gréaud states. Paul Ardenne when speaking about Gréaud referred to him as the “artist as phenomenologist,” describing his works and their high degree of sophistication as a “phenomenological subject.” Loris Gréaud was born in 1979 in Eaubonne, France. He lives and works in Paris.

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Colors:

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• technology.n.01
• science_fiction.n.01
• science.n.01
• delusion.n.03
• psychic_phenomena.n.01
• biochemistry.n.01