First on your left as you enter is a drawing, no more than a half-metre square, offering a window onto a strange kind of Eden. Giant flowers, twined like musical clefs, shade tiny trees through which goat-thighed imps frolic and drink toasts. A microcosmic Cockayne rendered in a spidery greyscale, it’s seemingly hellbent on leaving as little white space unfilled by fairytale whimsy as possible. But this is not an illustration from Tolkien nor a preparatory sketch for some phantasmagoria of Bosch or Enki Bilal. The signature identifies it as a product of the spirit world, by ‘Victorien Sardou, medium’.
There is something of the night about Purkinje Effect. Curated by artist Laurent Grasso for the Palais de Tokyo’s Nouvelles Vagues seasonof new curating talent, its title derives from the nocturnal distortion in colour contrast first noticed by Czech anatomist Jan Purkyne. Grasso cheerfully admits that he is no curator. Nonetheless, the selection testifies to a strain of research and adept juxtaposition that has long characterised his endeavours – in particular, perhaps, last year’s solo show Uraniborg, at the Jeu de Paume across town.
Working on that, Grasso became fascinated by a grotto built by Huguenot craftsman Bernard Palissy in the surrounding Tuileries gardens. So he was immediately struck, upon delving into Galerie 1900–2000’s collection, by a sketch (Quartier des Animaux chez Zoroastre, Bernard Palissy, c. 1860) by the aforementioned Sardou, a dramatist, apparently under psychic dictation from Palissy himself, now resident on Jupiter and living next door to Zoroaster (whose home, in florid curlicues, the drawing depicts).
Palissy’s ghost is not the only spirit haunting this exhibition. The death mask of Paul Éluard hangs austere and impassive, marred by bullet holes received during the liberation of Paris when it hung in André Breton’s studio. The two surrealists had been fascinated by death masks since their discovery, in the late 1920s, of a book by Ernst Benkard. Éluard confessed to Breton he had dreamt about an anonymous girl whose mask he’d seen in that book, and consequently took the unusual step of posing for his own cast. Hence Éluard’s death mask was shot while its model still lived.
Read the rest of my review of Galerie 1900–2000’s exhibition Purkinje Effect at Art Review.