A government building often isn’t the most inviting of spaces. The Palais d’Iéna, an imposing concrete structure designed by Auguste Perrier, one of France’s leading practitioners of Art Deco, is no exception. Completed in 1939, it was originally planned to house a museum, and is now the home of the Conseil économique social et environnemental, an advisory body.
In recent years, the building has been given over for a few days out of the year for artists commissions, and this time, it is hosting an elegant sculptural installation by Lucia Koch. Titled double trouble and on view through October 28, her installation is a series of semi-sheer curtains that cut across the space at various angles. It is at once severe and smooth.
Her curtains crisscross and slope, creating a sleek dialogue with the soaring concrete columns that typically divide the space. You’re meant to push them aside these partitions as you walk through them and feel the soft fabric as you do so. Dyed in a gradient pattern that goes from a vibrant orange to a deep magenta to a deep indigo, the installation is a feast for the eyes.
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Organized by independent curator Matthieu Poirier, the site-specific installation references Goethe’s theory of Trübe, which can be translated to “trouble” or “turbidity.” It involves the “formation of new colors in space and time” via the creation of a “transparency [that] is disturbed by the suspension of a myriad of tiny sediments,” Poirier writes in an exhibition text, adding, that Koch’s project “is part of this dual logic and echoes, in a non-literal way, our troubled times, where order and chaos compete for socio-political space.”
Indeed, with double trouble, Koch seemed to be asking how beauty can mask the at times insidious nature of power.
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