PARIS.- The Louvre has invited Claude Lévêque, a major figure on the international contemporary art scene, to create a site-specific work in its enormous medieval space. With its roots in the avant-gardes of the late 1970s, Lévêque’s work metamorphoses the spaces it occupies. Inspired by the moat and the keep, the artist has designed a self-contained viewing itinerary as a springboard for a narrative. Driven by a concentrated inner energy, Lévêque’s work interacts with the spaces it encounters, triggering a potent combination of evocation and sensation.

The first segment inside the Pyramid was intended as the prelude to the exhibition in the Medieval Louvre. Since April 2, 2014 the Louvre Pyramid, whose central column was designed to receive a monumental sculpture, has been home to the stark form of this segment of Lévêque’s on-site project. Coming in the wake of the sculptures of Loris Gréaud and Tony Cragg, and Wim Delvoye’s twisted Gothic spire, his intervention began with an incandescent installation inside Ieoh Ming Pei’s Pyramid.

With its links to ancient symbolism, this work echoes the triangular modules of tensile structures; at the same time it blends with the surrounding architecture and the broader prospect of the Carrousel du Louvre, the Place de la Concorde Obelisk, and La Défense.

The second part of the Claude Lévêque exhibition will move into the Medieval Louvre in October 2015.

The second segment of his intervention reactivates sensory space through its use of light, sound, objects, and materials. In their encounters with reality, one’s own memory and that of the venue, these components ambush visitors “between coercion and delight.”

Light, while embodied very differently in three phases of the itinerary, remains a recurring motif, both during the walk along the moat and inside the keep room.

After almost two years spent immersing himself in the atmosphere of the Louvre and its collection, Claude Lévêque has opted for a continuation of its artistic vocabulary. The narrative elements created in the medieval moat and the keep room are an extension of the lightning bolt under the Pyramid and directly reference the museum’s collection.

“Light and sound enact a complete metamorphosis. They are the twin primordial elements in any sensation. After that come texture, visual images, atmosphere, objects, and the rest.”