Claude Leveque’s works in Aether : De La Cosmologie à La Conscience
As part of the Centre Pompidou’s latest arts festival, an accompanying exhibition entitled Aether: De La Cosmologie à La Conscience features works from an important array of artists exploring the mystique and power of the beyond and unknown, the fifth element, the Aether. Artist and photographer to Purple’s latest issue, Claude Lévêque, paid a visit to the gallery to reflect on his work and the ether. Lévêque is well known for his large scale sculpture-installations fusing light, music and environment in which the ‘actual experience’ is fundamental. No stranger to controversy, Lévêque’s written phrase neon installations seize the capitalist fetish of advertising, inversing it as if only to point to its melancholic ephemera. In Ether (2002), the physical neon summons the concept through light. The very act of writing, transferring a thought into words is already volatile and immaterial. ‘A ‘hyper reality, a fiction’, he explains, ‘I do not have a sense of eternity, time is the metamorphose’. Lévêque is currently working on an autobiographical book focused on his work with text. Aether: De La Cosmologie à La Conscience features works from Marcel Duchamp, Brassaï, Louise Bourgeois, Man Ray, Fred Tomaselli, Gisèle Freund, Joachim Koester, Cyprien Gaillard and Wolfgang Tillmans amongst others. Through 19 March at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. Photo and text Sophie Pinchetti