L’espace et nous Cirrus

Colorful sweaters, public art installation
2 Rue de l’Horloge and 23 Rue du Champ Jacquet, Rennes

Cirrus has carried out a series of street art installations in Paris and Rennes that involve stacking colorful sweaters in window frames.

Each installation lasts between three and four hours and unfolds in several stages: at first, passersby are confronted with this pile of clothing; then the artist posts a simple sign reading, “Help yourself starting at 5:30 p.m.,” and attaches “Reserved” tags to some of the sweaters; finally, the moment arrives when anyone can actually take a sweater. All the while, Cirrus discreetly filmed people’s reactions. Thus, at the very moment the action was unfolding in the streets of Rennes, videos of the interventions that had already taken place in Paris were being screened in the exhibition space at La Criée. These two approaches allow for two different interpretations of the work: whereas in the urban space the passerby is a participant in a situation in which they do not recognize what is before their eyes, in the second context they become a spectator of an “object” whose status as a work of art is entirely derived from the specific characteristics of the location.

In the installation Space and Us, the sudden appearance of an unusual element in the city and the lack of any explanation disrupt our perception and the conventions we adopt in a given environment. In this way, Cirrus examines our habitual behavior in urban spaces—attention, aimless wandering, haste, curiosity, indifference—and the ways in which we make both physical (stepping back, moving closer, touching) and mental (transposing a domestic space into the city) shifts to understand this “object.”
Furthermore, L’espace et nous once again brings to mind the pictorial themes often present in Cirrus’s work. On the wall, the installation reads like a painting whose composition is carefully conceived and constantly reinvented. The artist plays with the colors of the clothing as if they were brushstrokes, along with the textures, contrasts, and the rough surface of the wall, which acts as a frame.

Alexandra Gillet