Seven stunning installations by Leandro Erlich to turn your head upside down at the Grand Palais

Leandro Erlich defines himself as “a conceptual artist working on the border of reality and perception”. Born in Argentina in 1973, he lives and works between Buenos Aires, Paris and Montevideo in Uruguay. His creations have been included in the collections of prestigious museums throughout the world. The strength of his work lies in his direct relationship with the public. The Argentinian says he designs ““Works that only exist through visitors”, whom he considers to be his co-authors. Probing the relationship between reality, representation and experience, he explores “the mechanisms through which we construct our understanding of the world”. Long before the advent of artificial intelligence, he questioned: do we believe what we see or do we see what we believe?

The retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris brings together his key pieces until September 6 and gives a very complete overview of his work. Splendid models, often animated, retrace his creative journey which began at the age of 21. The people of Bordeaux will be able to admire La Carte, Ã l’ombre de la ville, the shade created in 2023 for the Belvédère district, a metal lace reproducing the plan of the Gironde capital. Out of fourteen immersive installations, we selected seven, or half, tested among other “spect-actors” on the opening day of the exhibition. As its curator, the journalist Fabrice Bousteau, writes, “Leandro Erlich’s work invites us to put aside our certainties and transports us into a universe made of reversals, perceptual disturbances and mental questions“. If the objects at first seem familiar and the situations banal, they later reveal themselves to be inexplicably strange. Caught in an experience as playful as it is intriguing, we come to doubt our senses.

1 The port of reflections

The first installation, an entry into poetic matter, plunges us into semi-obscurity. The visitor zigzags down a ramp which leads to a pier. It then overlooks a small port where six boats are moored and rock gently. We hear the lapping of the water. It’s peaceful and quite charming. But looking closer… there’s something wrong. We gradually realize that there is no water under the boats and that the reflections that we were sure we saw are mirages.

No tricks in Leandro Erlich’s art, everything is revealed. We then have fun trying to understand. How did he manage to fool us? Only one boat has its oars in the water. Their reflection is in reality a wooden sculpture. The six boats that one would have sworn to have counted are only three. A mechanical system makes them oscillate. Because they look like boats, move like boats, and because we know that boats float on water, our brains have imagined the rest. The work reveals how much we see things through the prism of our prejudices. It invites us to question the relationship between image and reality, hence its title: Port of Reflexions. Should we doubt everything? How to disentangle the false from the true?

2 The captive clouds

The atmosphere of the second room, just as magical, is revealed at the top of a ramp. Three clouds float in the night, encapsulated in small wooden furniture, display cases reminiscent of the curio cabinets of yesteryear. “I like to think that clouds are the earliest human art form“, says Leandro Erlich. Before sculpting or drawing on the walls of the caves, he thought that “we looked at the sky” où, sans même y penser, “we found a shape in a cloud: a dog, a turtle, a face, a boat...” These vaporous captives illustrate for him a tendency of humanity to want to add order and shapes to what does not have any. Perhaps also to put everything in boxes. To capture the ephemeral, the Argentinian artist created these magical boxes, again very poetic. It brings the natural world inside the Grand Palais The illusion is total but by going around these windows, we discover that each cloud is made up of around ten printed and superimposed glass plates. This object that we imagined to be solid is in reality an accumulation of voids.

3 The view

The following installation, more playful, transforms us into voyeurs. The View is the first video sculpture imagined by Leandro Erlich almost thirty years ago. The artist was inspired by a nocturnal urban landscape to pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Fenêtre sur cour. Still in the dark, we can see two windows protected by Venetian blinds. By spreading the slats a little, we discover what could be the facade of a building made up of 12 windows. On each of these skylights, in reality screens, a scene from daily life takes place. Two girls try on clothes in a room, a couple seems to be in the middle of a housekeeping scene. The experience has the flavor of forbidden pleasures. Transgressive, it allows us to spy on the lives of others, as we have certainly all done, without fear of being surprised. Erlich often explores the theme of the persistence of hidden worlds, behind the banal and sometimes tasteless facade of normality.

4 The infinite stairwell

The exhibition continues upstairs where day follows night. A fascinating “Documentation piece” returns with the help of photos, models and videos on the craziest urban creations of Leandro Erlich. In total, 41 works scattered across the four corners of the globe, including his famous uprooted houses. The visitor can then get lost in a maze of elevator cabins (Elevator Maze) then into this dizzying stairwell. The artist invites us to physically enter his trompe l’Å“il and plays with our fear of heights. Completed with mirrors, the device creates a mise en abyme from which we emerge dazed.How does he do it? How does it work?” These questions come back to the lips of visitors who are as disoriented as they are amused. The artist simply placed the staircase and its cage on the ground, as if an entire building had fallen on its side. In doing so, he also shifts all our bearings. By removing the essential function of the staircase – going up and down – he creates, through the subversion of our senses, a disconcerting work of art.

5 Fitting rooms

Leandro Erlich uses mirrors very frequently. Visitors can reflect themselves infinitely, as in the stairwell, but to deceive our senses and our habits, he sometimes likes to make them disappear. These thirty juxtaposed fitting rooms form a small labyrinth that he imagined in 2008. The Argentinian removed one of the mirrors which generally acts as a wall to allow us to change in complete privacy. As we sit down on the stool to calmly examine his work, we are surprised to see our neighbor in the cabin enter where we expected to see our own reflection. And vice versa. Which makes us both smile.”Most of my works become devices designed for human interaction and exchange“, explains Leandro Erlich.

6 La fenêtre et l’échelle

This life-saving ladder placed on a window suspended in the void was created in 2008 in New Orleans, a city in the south of the United States devastated three years earlier by the passage of Hurricane Katrina. “Too late for help“, says the title of this political work. Walking through flooded areas after the city’s levees broke, Leandro Erlich spotted a spot near the recently rebuilt retaining walls. He was close enough to the adjacent structures for him to understand that there, before the hurricane, was a neighborhood of houses built side by side. It was in this part of the city that the flood caused the greatest number of victims, as people could not be saved in time. The Argentinian created the first version of this work as part of the exhibition Prospect 1 aiming to culturally rebuild the bereaved city. This suspended window and its ladder are now installed in the sculpture garden of the New Orleans Art Museum which acquired it.

7 The building

Highlight of the show, Bâtiment is in some ways Leandro Erlich’s best-seller. The work was also chosen to illustrate the exhibition poster. Created in 2004 for White Night In Paris, this monumental installation has since seen replicas throughout the world, adapting to the characteristics of local architecture. This is demonstrated by a series of photos taken in Japan, England, China, Australia and Hong Kong. The idea is as simple as it is brilliant; you just had to think about it. Visitors are invited to walk, for 3 minutes per person, on an almost life-size reproduction of the facade of a building placed flat on the ground. Gladly playing guinea pigs, we walk vertically on this horizontal facade to reach a window located at the very top. Then, we lie down in a deliberately acrobatic position under the window, head down, pretending to hang our feet on the railing. It remains to admire the result in the immense mirror tilted at 45 degrees above the installation [voir photo ci-dessus]. A dizzying “performance” but without the slightest danger which delights visitors of all kinds, whatever their age, size and origin. The most daring even improvise Tom Cruise-style stunts which they immortalize with selfies in the mirror. By creating the impossible, Leandro Erlich makes art a playground accessible to all. This stunning exhibition, literally and figuratively, is a real favorite.

Leandro Erlich au Grand Palaisfrom June 2 to September 6, 2026, 1 avenue Winston Churchill, in Paris, by the Clarence Dillon entrance. Open every day from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., except July 14, late night on Fridays until 10 p.m., full price at 19 euros, reduced rates from 10 to 16 euros, free for under 5s.