Laurent Grasso is an artist who works in a variety of media, but foremost he conceives works which mix together many types of elements, including film. Laurent Grasso’s video work consists in extracting potentially cinematographic phenomena from reality by scripting – or perhaps we should say virtualizing – that which is captured by the mechanical eye of the camera. His work inhabits the margin, the limit of the real, by making the camera take a point of view which is generally unusual in relation the scene which is filmed. The main character in Laurent Grasso’s films is never directly present because this character is the camera itself. He sees it as an autonomous object which does not obey the reflexes of the human gaze. “It scrutinizes reality as it were a foreign territory”, says the artist. His videos take the form of installations or devices where sound plays an important role, both as a true material and as a vector for “unreality” (…)
What matters here – and because these installations also obey the rules of capture – is to know how the viewer is brought to move throughout interior. Since these installations have no real geometric center, viewers are incited to wander throughout the space so as to multiply their points of view and points of listening. In reality, these installations also function as traps: we enter into the interior in order to become a constitutive element, even if there is no question of intervening concretely in the works’ settings and modes of operation (...)

Excerpts from an Espace Paul Ricard press release “Laurent Grasso Paracinéma”, December 2005; and from Christophe Khim, “Laurent Grasso”, published by Actes Sud Altadis, March 2006