Introduction
A Time Coloured Space is the first solo exhibition in Portugal of the work of Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno (born in 1964). The exhibition occupies all of the galleries of the Serralves Museum, the auditorium foyer and auditorium. One of the most influential artists of his generation, Parreno creates work that crosses media of every kind, from cast sculpture and drawing to film and light animations generated by mathematical algorithms and organic life forms. The exhibition as a medium and form is fundamental to his vast and encompassing oeuvre. For Parreno, an exhibition is not a collection of individual objects but an artwork in itself, a polyphonic but coherent ‘object’, what he describes as ‘a project’. For Parreno, his art works maintain the status of the quasi-object awaiting their activation and eventual significance in the context of each exhibition.
A Time Coloured Space continues Parreno’s project of the work of art and the exhibition as a self-generating form. Like a piece of music that plays itself and begins to improvise over time, the exhibition at Serralves will evolve during the course of its presence in the Museum. The language of the puppeteer and the automaton enter into the structure of the exhibition and the architectural frame of the museum, which becomes alive, and in which the disposition of elements become part of a dramaturgy of an unseen script.
Parreno has structured A Time Coloured Space according to concepts of repetition and counterpoint, qualities that can be found in the Baroque composition of the fugue. Responding to the progression of galleries of the Serralves Museum designed by Álvaro Siza, and the philosophical framework of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1968), each of the exhibition’s thirteen rooms constitute a progression of recurring iterations, differentiated by variations in colour and arrangement, of objects, light and sound. The past, represented by works of art produced over time, and the future, in the form of the exhibition continuing to write itself, are inscribed into the present of each visitor’s experience. The exhibition becomes a factory in which to engineer these variables, and, in the words of the artist, ‘a form of imitation becomes a new invention’.
While the exhibition constitutes a process of self-creation, it also speaks to more classic forms of the retrospective, bringing together for the first time many of Parreno’s most emblematic series dating from the early 1990s until the present. They repeat in contrapuntal rhythm throughout the museum, with each room triggering effects of doubling, recurrence and after-image. The rhythms and pulsations of light and sound, and the movement of window blinds and wall are programmed to the musical score of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fugue no. 24 in D Minor, as it is being translated and rehearsed in real time by the mathematical algorithm of an artificial intelligence installed into the Museum’s lighting and technological systems.
– A Guide to the Exhibition by Suzanne Cotter