Vincent Leroy is familiar with his name, and he loves to tinker with mirrors and materials, such as hanging 60 beaded curtains of magnifying glasses on Venice's canals or simulating the weightless atmosphere of cosmic space with slowly rotating inflators in 17th-century churches.
Vincent Leroy's work always feels like a dream, light and soft. Over the past few years, Vincent Leroy's art installations have been to deserts, canyons, churches, canals, and art galleries, and he seems to be particularly adept at using the strong contrast between form and material and the venue, the lightness of the installation itself and the slow and uniform movement to create a surreal atmosphere.
Recently, Vincent Leroy came to Tokyo with his new metacloud. Imagine when you see a blue cloud-like suspended object swinging with the wind on a bustling street corner, will there be a feeling of familiarity and strangeness, lucidly breaking into the dream?
Conceptually, the installation in the series is named Metacloud, but the artist himself makes it clear that it has nothing to do with the recently hyped metaverse, meta as a prefix, which has a meaning of transcendence and transcendence, and "cloud" has long been a buzzword in the field of technology, extracting the cloud as an almost all-time enveloping us but often undetected. Metacloud wants to take advantage of the cloud's intents and metaphors, while turning it into something that cannot be ignored or even touched, and uses this conceptual structure to stimulate our senses and minds.
Formally, Metacloud is almost a combination of contradictions. The hollow design woven from curved bamboo pieces gives it the light texture of a cloud, but it has real limitations due to its fixed form. It hovers above the ground, moving freely, but unable to escape the pull of reality. Looking at the past from different angles, there are different moiré patterns that are both fascinating and dizzying. It sits in the busiest center of Tokyo, yet moves slowly at its own unique pace without hesitation.
This piece was tailor-made for Tokyo by Vincent Leroy. The artist believes that a big city like Tokyo during the epidemic is like a dozing person, in the middle of half-dreaming, and he hopes to amplify this "daydream" atmosphere, so that passers-by can feel the charm of art in the blurred boundary between dream and reality.