Artist: Laurent Grasso

Perrotin presents the first solo exhibition by Laurent Grasso at the gallery’s London space. Winner of the prestigious Marcel Duchamp Prize (2008), Grasso is internationally renowned for his immersive works that merge history, science, and fiction.

At the center of the exhibition is the film Orchid Island (2023), shot in remote sites off the coasts of Taiwan. Rendered entirely in black and white, lush tropical landscapes are overshadowed by the apparition of a vast, levitating black rectangle. At once abstract, alien, and supernatural, this enigmatic form unsettles our perception of time and place. Suspended between archival imagery and science fiction, and accompanied by a hypnotic score by Nicolas Godin (from Air), the film embodies Grasso’s ability to transform landscapes into metaphysical experiences. Beneath the apparent beauty of the images, Orchid Island reveals the invisible strata of a history marked by contemporary forms of dispossession. By almost entirely erasing human presence, the film—oscillating between utopia and dystopia, also questions the construction of a fantasized exoticism seen through the eyes of early explorers.

As is often the case in Laurent Grasso’s work, the same motif reappears in his painting from the series Studies into the Past, where idyllic historical landscapes are disrupted by the intrusion of the black rectangle, a disturbing anomaly that haunts the scene like a memory of the future. In Tropical Scene, this form is materialized through a sheet of dark plexiglass embedded in the painting, creating a physical presence that obscures and reframes the composition.

The exhibition also presents a cloud from the Anima series, here translated into a palladium foil painting and a constellation of neon works. For Grasso, the cloud is not a simple meteorological motif but a threshold between the earthly and the celestial, a mutable form that absorbs projections of both fear and desire. Its palladium surface shimmers with an almost cosmic intensity, while the neon outline evokes a gaseous, unstable state. Both ethereal and toxic, the cloud speaks to the ambiguity of our time, where the sublime beauty of the sky coexists with the looming threat of environmental catastrophe.

Pursuing his reflection on time and on the possibility of traveling through time, the series Future Herbarium is executed in the manner of 18th-century botanical herbariums. It records imaginary mutations of a post-disaster flora. Conceived in parallel with the making of his film ARTIFICIALIS (presented in the central nave of the Musée d’Orsay in 2021), these works recall the special effects of flowers that appear superimposed on certain shots in the film. Between science and speculation, the series proposes a future archive of nature marked by catastrophe, mutation, and survival.

Finally, the eyes of the Panoptes series return in a new sculptural form: a tree-like organism where each branch ends in an eye. At once organic and technological, this hybrid being recalls ancient theories of vision, animist cosmologies, and contemporary surveillance systems.

Together, these works articulate Laurent Grasso’s singular artistic vocabulary. By mobilizing motifs that are both familiar and strange, he creates an expanded field of vision where history coexists with projection, science with myth, and the real with the artificial.