A Long, Strange Group Show Trip

PARIS — Inside, at the Palais de Tokyo, is group show as inner wormhole. The metaphoric theme of this exhibition of videos, numinous wall works, and scenic installation art — curated by Jean de Loisy, Daria de Beauvais, and Katell Jaffrè — is the disturbing inner space of a trip. Through the use of physical immersion, the works present an expressive opportunity for introspective passage, one that often leads to the freak-out vulnerability of the internal self.

This ambitious show contains work by mostly mid-career French artists born in the 1970s. It is constructed as a long continuum of connected chambers that takes up two of the huge floors of the Palais de Tokyo. The resulting art odyssey is feverishly romantic, full of dark imagination that bends towards the primal in a way that was both physically immersive and mentally engaging, often holding me in a state of intense but pleasurable concentration. There is an eerie tone to most of the work, as it blends romantic despair (some with the urgency of comedy) with bitter self-loathing; inner melodramatic voraciousness with overwhelming scale.

Overhead at the entrance I encountered a sprawling, claustrophobia-inspiring flourish, as two people were working their way through a transparent tunnel system created out of Scotch tape by the collective Numen/For Use. This monumental installation suggested to me both organic innards and a cocooned spider’s web, a hint at what is to come: a drop into the webbed-depths of the psyche.

This metaphysical drop starts by passing through a densely delicate cardboard forest by Eva Jospin. It well prepares us for the fairytale-like sensorial propensities to come, often based in deportments of fear and introspection. Such as in the magically hushed drama of Stéphane Thidet’s forest themed cabin “Le Refuge” (2014), similar to those in which hikers spend the night. Inside, reversing without with within, incessant streams of water dropped convincingly like rain, slowly destroying the furniture and books. Emotionally, it delivered an air of magical but blunt grimness.

In another sensually rugged yet thought-provoking work, Abraham Poincheval showed the pimped-out bear carcass that he lived in for two weeks while being filmed by two cameras.

Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus also presented the ensnarling pull of the forest on the psyche with their installation of a series of beautiful white sculptures based on drawings made by patients during a psychological test in which they were asked to draw a tree.

Nearby, I traversed the transcendent sheen of Marcius Galan’s Fred Sandback-ish illusionist piece — a move that enabled me to dematerialize and pass through the looking glass.

As my amble continued, things got self-absorbed and grotesque, with Sookoon Ang’s video installation “Exorcise Me.” Here, teenage girls in school uniforms wear death metal-like painted masks while taking languorous poses that recall the young girls painted by Balthus.

The animated films of Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg are wildly grotesque, imbued with fake blood and chaos. The vibrant surfaces of their cartoon figures belie volcanic fantasies of fear. A gigantic sprouting “Potato” (2008) holds three animations and forms the core of their installation. Other animations, projected large on the surrounding walls, show psychoanalytical narratives of animism, all wracked with the tortured human body. They display a very gloomy sense of violent hilarity that touches on a folklore of the dark side. This grandiose room is sometimes quite beautiful and moving, even when emotionally violent. Traveling in the head of these artists takes guts.

Also brazenly concocting a roiling inner underworld is the painter dran, an artist who first gained recognition through his books La télévision (2005), Ma ville, je l’aime (2005), and 100 jours et quelques (2010). Here he has taken over the big staircase connecting the two floors of the exhibit. His graphic tour de force, exclusively painted in black on white walls, constitutes a spatial story (très mystérieuses) that unfolds as one walks down the stairs to the bummer stuff below.

Andro Wekua suggests a contemplative relationship to claustrophobia with a sculpture of a wax mannequin with its head encapsulated in a house, a painting, and a short film that borders on science fiction, “Never Sleep With a Strawberry in Your Mouth II” (2010-2012).

With his work “L’Homme qui tousse” (1969), Christian Boltanski presents a film of a modestly dressed man sitting on the floor of a dilapidated room, his body wracked continuously as he coughs up blood that flows over his chest and legs.

“Get Out of my Mind, Get Out of This Room” (1968), a sound installation by Bruce Nauman, offered me an immersive experience of abuse. It consists of an empty small white room, filled only with sound of a voice that seems to come from all directions. Simply constructed, it consisted of a male voice shouting and moaning the injunction of the title. There is nothing to see. Yet the rhythmic pattern of the voice bleating out this repetitious ornately coupled incantation without end locked me into a surround-sound immersive cognitive/dissonant situation: one of attraction/repulsion.

However, if we are not to settle for affirmations of the claustrophobicness or emptiness of our being, it seems to me that any immersive proposition must also be an initiatory one done at the limits of ourselves. This means, on the one hand, opening up a realm of doubt, but on the other, a test of affinity with contemporary ideas of infinity. So I think that the best piece in the show was Marc Couturier’s sleek monumental mural drawing, “Troisième jour [third day]” (2014); a beautifully vague work that turns inner intimacy sumptuous and grand. Couturier’s ensnarling pencil drawing is a maelstrom of mystery that faintly suggests a forest of trees. It flows in one spontaneous and continuous gesture, evoking unseen realms and timeless obscurities. The subject refers to the Book of Genesis in which, on the third day of Creation, the waters withdraw from the earth to create vegetation.

Magnificent yet delicate, the piece calls for a contemplation that yields to the fuzzy but palpable poetry that exists inside each of us. It is a probing of intimate precision as it might mesh with a stylishly vast turbulence; a probing of an inner life as bold as landscape.

Inside continues at the Palais de Tokyo (13 Avenue du Président Wilson – 16e, Paris) through January 11, 2015.