To enter a room and not see your own reflection. To look through a window and discover that behind the shutters the lives of strangers are unfolding. To stand before a building façade and suddenly feel as though you are walking on its walls, defying gravity. This is often how the works of Leandro Erlich operate: they begin with ordinary situations and gradually alter the viewer’s perceptual coordinates. The major retrospective organised by the Grand Palais brings together more than thirty years of research by the Argentine artist through an immersive exhibition path composed of monumental installations, interactive environments and new productions. After Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Miami, Milan and Helsinki, this is the first time France has dedicated an exhibition of this scale to Erlich. Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Erlich has developed an artistic practice that uses everyday architecture as a tool of visual and psychological destabilisation. Staircases, elevators, fitting rooms, windows, corridors and urban façades are transformed into perceptual devices that continuously challenge what we believe we are seeing. His works are not simply meant to be observed: they demand to be crossed, inhabited and physically experienced. Rather than producing mere spectacular illusions, Erlich uses perception as a critical instrument. His works reveal how much the idea of reality depends on cultural conventions, visual automatisms and shared mental constructions. The strength of his work lies precisely in this constant oscillation between physical experience and perceptual doubt.
