BY SOME STRANGE TWIST OF FATE, major museum retrospectives of Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno—two figures engaged in one of the art world’s most intense dialogues of the past twenty years—were on view concurrently in Paris this winter. But however coincidental the timing was, and however much talk their pairing has generated, these one-man shows are wholly incomparable, even incommensurate. On the one hand, Parreno occupied the totality of the Palais de Tokyo, his work synchronically animating an immense space like the mad computer in 2001 piloting the spacecraft. On the other,

PHILIPPE PARRENO’S ambitious semiretrospective “Anywhere, Anywhere, Out of the World” is the first exhibition to fill the entire Palais de Tokyo. The artist has transformed the galleries into a total artwork–cum–mise-en-scène: a sensuously complex atmosphere of space, sound, and images, called a “dramaturgy” by its curators, Jean de Loisy and Mouna Mekouar. Parreno’s Gesamtkunstwerk is scripted around a score, pianist Mikhail Rudy’s rendition of Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka (1910–11), which tells the tale of a puppet come to life and here functions as a model for making an exhibition do the

Francis Baudevin is aware of the historical trajectory and destiny of pictorial abstraction: Experimental and avant-garde forms of representation have not only been domesticated in the halls of museums and universities; absorbed by industrial design, they are employed on packaging, as visual signage, and in advertising—for the mass communication and marketing of big business. Abstraction—above all geometric abstraction—has a constant presence within the contemporary visual experience as a sort of “abstraction trouvé,” so ubiquitous in the panorama of consumer culture that it

Broadly speaking, Ian Kiaer’s methodology evokes the intricate process of placing heterogeneous elements in a plane within an accurate perspective (or at least a desired one). In other words, despite its sculptural guise, his work avails itself of a concept historically attached to painting. Not many individual positions so epitomize the expanded nature of artistic practice today as Kiaer’s, in which voids convey content as much as forms do. Scattered around the exhibition space, his fragmentary objects paradoxically sparked the notion of a whole as he immersed the viewer in scenarios built on