ART-PRESENTATION: Olafur Eliasson at Versailles
For the last 8 years Versailles president Catherine Pégard invites a contemporary artist to form a dialogue between their own work and the architecture of the 17th Century Château de Versailles. For 2016 Olafur Eliasson brings a sequence of spatial interventions, with waterfalls, fog, mirrors, and light landscapes installed around the gardens and château interior.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Studio Olafur Eliasson Archive
Olafur Eliasson challenges our vision of the world through his installations, which make use of projected light, kaleidoscopic views, mirrors and complex geometric structures. He also develops architectural projects and proposals that seek to add a social perspective to art. As the artist himself writes, “Art has the capacity to transform our perceptions and perspectives of the world”. Olafur Eliasson hopes that his exhibition at the Château de Versailles, which includes a triptych of site-specific, water-related projects in the palace gardens, will stimulate reflection on climate change. Featuring three outdoor Installations that focus on different states of water (liquid, fog and ice) and a series of indoor installations entered upon illumination, the dialogue between Eliasson’s work and the Palace’s architecture encourages visitors to take charge of their own experience. “The Versailles that I have been dreaming up is a place that empowers everyone. It invites visitors to take control of the authorship of their experience instead of simply consuming and being dazzled by the grandeur. It asks them to exercise their senses, to embrace the unexpected, to drift through the gardens, and to feel the landscape take shape through their movement”. In the Gardens Olafur Eliasson has imported 150 tons of glacial rock flour from Greenland to create his land art-inspired “Glacial rock flour garden” (2016), the work is arranged around the statue of Persephone, the goddess of spring, in the Colonnade grove, “Fog assembly” (2016) emits clouds of mist, while “Waterfall” (2016) is a vast cascade of water falling from a construction crane at the basin of the Grand Canal, reminiscent of the four waterfalls the artist installed in New York’s East River in 2008. Inside the Château de Versailles, Eliasson has installed a series of “subtle space interventions” using mirrors and light. “The curious museum” (2010), consisting of mirrors placed behind the windows of the Hercules Room, reflects the room’s arches back at the visitor, while, at the end of the Hall of Mirrors, the reflective triangle of “Your sense of unity” (2016)— conjures a multiplicity of illuminated circles. The artist’s approach continues with “Solar compression” (2016), a suspended mirror that rotates, slowly, one edge of it emanating orange light. It reflects the marquetry of the wooden floorboards and the fireplace in the King’s Guards’ Room. The subtlest piece, though, is “The gaze of Versailles” (2016), two gold balls placed on a window pane in the Lower Gallery, looking out over the gardens.
Info: Curator: Alfred Pacquement, Château de Versailles, Place d’Armes, Versailles, Duration: 7/6-30/10/16, Days & Hours: Palace: Tue-Sun 9:00-18:30, The Gardens: 8:00-20:30 (17:30 on Saturdays with Fountains Night Shows and on 7/7 and 30/10), http://en.chateauversailles
