Laurent Grasso studied at the Cooper Union School in New York and the Central Saint Martins School of Art in London as well as the Beaux-Arts in Paris. Over the years, he has developed a singular body of work dealing with the implementation of paranoiac image devices through videos, photographs and installations. Indeed, all of his work subtly evokes the different perturbations of the definition or identification of the image of reality as these affect visual or sound perceptions or the registers of the imagination when reality itself is caught in the endless trap of its multi-layered interpretation.

All of Grasso's works generate a time which is stretched out, expanded, through the evocation of situations, strange actions which systematically hide themselves from the eye. The artist seeks to provoke a feeling of confusion or uneasiness in the viewer. His devices 'act' first of all on the viewer's percepts and affects so as to question the mechanisms of adherence and belief, the means of conditioning through the image. His works question our abilities to distinguish what is imaginary from what is strictly documentary as the artist weaves them together in a single representation. Some of his works attempt to destabilise the gaze and perception by creating points of dizziness, as with the entropic point of view of Vertigo (2005), the disturbing cloud of Projection (2005) and the blurring of meanings in Missing Time (2002).

From the fleeting scenes glimpsed in the pubic space with Mes actrices (My actrices, 1999) or Soyez les bienvenus (Welcome, 1999), Grasso retains the cast shadows, the grey areas, the unsaid, to leave the way open for the irrational. In Tout est possible (Everything is possible, 2002), the artist immerses the viewer in a labyrinthine soliloquy, speech which escapes all control, combined with a ghostly image which resists the domination of the sound to condition a 'floating' reading and listening alike. With Le temps manquant (Missing time, 2002), Grasso introduces the principle of a point of view outside the sequence shot, that of an airborne mechanical body in motion which films soccer players immobilised on the field as if they were caught in the vertigo of a fateful moment (in fact, a tiny camera embedded in a model airplane which films the scene from a sight elevation).

Radio Ghost (2004) goes more deeply into the possible scenarios taking shape between the elevated viewpoint (a territory is filmed from above) and the presence of a voiceover. Architectural elements, parts of a city – Hong Kong – the urban landscape are gradually stripped of their identities to create an abstract, hypnotic space. The voice-over is composed of a group of testimonies collected on the subject of belief in the reality of ghosts.

Over the years, Grasso has defined the underground 'architecture' structuring his work by exploring the possibilities of installations referring to film.  Paracinéma (2006) and the Magnetic Palace project (2007), conceived at the invitation of the Institut d'Art Contemporain of Villeurbaine, make the world of film and projected images a practical tool for creation and scenography.

Pascale Cassagnau

Translated by Miriam Rosen