The Visitors

April 23rd, 6:00 p.m. - May 3rd.

If ever a single monument symbolises Paris, it’s the Eiffel Tower. Constructed by Gustave Eiffel for the Universal Exhibition of 1889 (like the Grand Palais and the Petit Palais for the same event, eleven years later) Paris’s “Iron Lady” rises to a height of 324 metres in the heart of the city : a unique symol of France and its capital, instantly recognisable around the world. Most visitors enjoy the Eiffel Tower by day, but it was also designed to look resplendent at night. The first lights on the tower date from 1889, but since 1997 it has been decorated with regular, changing displays celebrating a variety of events from the entry into the new millennium in 2000, the Chinese New Year, Europe Day (May 9), or the Rugby World Cup, hosted by France in 2007.

Since 21 June 2001, the Eiffel Tower has glittered for ten minutes every hour, on the hour, from nightfall to 1 a.m. in winter, and until 2 a.m. in summer, making it every Paris night owl’s favourite luminous clock. Invited to create a work in relation to a Paris monument, Bertrand Lavier naturally thought of the city’s “First Lady”, and expressed his wish to revolutionise Parisian habits by modifying the tower’s nocturnal starburst.

For the first eleven days of La Force de l’Art 02, the Eiffel Tower will sparkle at random, as part of a programme of interventions devised specially for the occasion. This unprecedented experiment is designed to alter the perception of visitors accustomed to the sparkling display’s regular schedule, encouraging us – like amateur astronomers watching for a shooting star in the night sky – to exercise patience as we wait for the enchanting sight.

www.tour-eiffel.fr

Bertrand Lavier

Wishing to "distort academic categories", Bertrand Lavier appropriates consumer products to test the notion of what an art work is. "Ready-made" sculptures, a Picasso car repainted in Klein blue, statues of primitive art cast in bronze, but also Stella paintings turned into neon, Rothko abstract canvases into moving images, the artist, with these short-circuits, reinvents reading of the history of shapes and materials.

Protean, Bertrand Lavier’s work draws one in by the incongruity of his crossbreeding experiments that is as surrealistic as "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella". [M. A. ]

Bertrand Lavier was born in 1949 in Châtillon-sur-Seine.
He lives and works in Paris and in Aignay-le-Duc.