(F)LUX INTER TENEBRAS

In situ RAINER GROSS

Juni 2024 tot Juni 2025

At the invitation of the Centre d'Art Contemporain du Luxembourg Belge (CACLB), which is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2024, the Orval Abbey is hosting a temporary installation by Rainer Gross in the ruins of its medieval church. The artist, born in Berlin in 1953, has lived in Brussels since 1977.

Rainer Gross's sculptural installations are monumental works conceived on the scale of architecture or landscape. They consist of hundreds of pieces of wood patiently assembled together. At Orval, an irregular black line springs up from the ground near the vanished staircase that once led to the monks' dormitory. It rises and spreads across the transept and choir of this ruined building, crossing the gable of the rose window before returning to the earth.  

The line and suppleness of this sculptural work carry the spectator along with them. At once light and imposing, aerial and rooted, the installation is detached from its environment, yet echoes it, creating an overall impression of contrast but also of exchange and interaction with the architecture. The site becomes an integral part of the work.

Beyond a physical experience, Rainer Gross makes us aware of the signs of change, decay and disappearance in the site's past.

The spatial deployment of the work through the openings and walls of the architecture intersects with the rhythm of a monastic day. It opens up another horizon of meaning, that of a taming between the artist and the monastic site. Human life is called upon to open up, to allow itself to be mysteriously crossed by rays of light, like so many signs that enter into dialogue with the serenity of a place that has survived the centuries and is still alive.

Rainer Gross has created over forty monumental installations in situ in a wide variety of locations in the Benelux countries, Italy and Sweden, but most of them in France (for example, the Massif du Sancy, the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire, the Abbey of Noirlac, the historic centres of Poitiers and Colmar, the Episcopal Palace in Narbonne, City of Carcassonne, City Hall in Le Havre, Porte des Allemands in Metz...).