Exhibitions

Laurent Pariente is a young French artist who has achieved a unique synthesis of sculpture, architecture and painting. His work first came to the attention of Robert Hopper, curator of this show, at the Biennale d'Art Contemporain, Lyon in 1991. The installation at the Institute was Pariente's first solo exhibition outside France and coincides with the construction of his first architectural commission, the design of a complete and functional factory at Boulogne-sur-Mer in northern France.

In the introduction to the exhibtion catalogue, robert Hopper Explains that 'The ideological base of Pariente's work... is in conceptual art and performance art, through which he achieves a physical presence be reference to Modernist architecture and paiting. The result... is an environment that defies description. There is no perspectival movement towards a centre; there is no boundary, no exterior. There is simply the presence of the visitor and the activation of the senses within an environment that cannot be understood by logical analysis. This is not an object that can be walked around and seen from the outside. The idea of outside and inside is ambiguous in a work that can only exist through actual experience. The visitor who wishes to understand this work, must participate in a performance which has no script, no beginning and no end, and which occurs within a constructed environment of a multiple choice'. Pariente creates an 'architecture' of human experience, a gesamtkunstwerk to intrigue and engage the mind and the senses.