Where Laurent Grasso skillfully links micro and macro. Precisely how the hyperrealism of our cities is the setting for individuals who have consciousness, unconsciousness, deep within themselves, linked to the strictest intimacy, to the irrational, to spirits, to ghosts, to a beyond of reality which for each of us is what allows us to be completely in reality precisely.

The system proposed by Laurent Grasso exposes, indicates, informs about the very content of the stakes of the scenario he has imagined. Not a scenario linked to the construction of a narrative, but more precisely a working scenario so that the story, the stories are inscribed. Laurent Grasso is one of those artists inspired by the principles of reality linked to the imaginary. In the modes of construction of his work, the possible perceptive alterations are transformed into attentions.
Hallucinations, vertigo, dreams, excesses, ghostly spirits, sensory experiences constitute the vocabulary of his research.

In this sound projection booth, we are in relationship with beings telling us stories so intimate that their very nature is indefinable. No beautiful stories, no dramas, no nightmares, only strange because they are foreign to us. The sound of the sound is so intimate that its very nature is undefinable.
In the room, however, we are in a physically reduced relationship with the spectacle of this model city, a contemporary generic of a hyper reality. Here it is the eye that flies over and not the body placed at the heart of life, at the foot of buildings.


Laurent Grasso has been working for a few years to transcribe the invisible in his works (mainly photographic, video and sound); more precisely, he seeks to create tension through absence.
In Projection, one of his recent works, a shapeless mass invades the streets of Paris without anyone knowing what it is really about. This “cloud” whose nature is indefinable (dust or water vapor?) inevitably advances. Yet its movement does not seem to disturb anything. The sound that accompanies this scene is muffled, enveloping and just as disturbing.
The work of this artist is imbued with doubt and anxiety, irrationality and mystery, paranoia and threat provoked by reality. Laurent Grasso does not draw a narrative videography, which announces or represents. He gives viewers new and strong experiences.
In contact with his hypnotic and singular exhibition devices, we can extrapolate, imagine, wait, project, since he creates open works that propel us and install us in a borderline and strange state where the sensory experience is fundamental.

Testing our ability to understand situations, to read images, Laurent Grasso suggests with a certain excess the presence of ghostly spirits (Radio Ghost, 2004), strange phenomena (Projection, 2005) or escaping rituals (Soyez les bienvenus, 2002). The forms of hallucinations that he sets up by altering perception suggest his attention to merging the intimate and the universal.

Claire Le Restif