CAN YOU TRUST WHAT YOU SEE? LEANDRO ERLICH AT THE GRAND PALAIS, PARIS

This Tuesday, following stops in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Miami, Milan, and even Helsinki, France presents in Paris for the first time a full retrospective — enriched with new productions — dedicated to one of the most singular and celebrated artists of the contemporary scene: Leandro Erlich (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1973). The exhibition invites visitors to step beyond the boundaries of the everyday and enter a universe where the architectures of daily life become the stage for a subtle yet powerful transformation — where illusion is not deception, but a tool for knowledge, and where the viewer becomes the protagonist of the work, called upon to question their senses and their certainties.

Erlich is renowned for his monumental immersive installations, which turn the viewer into an active participant in the work. His creations are meant to be lived, traversed, and questioned, combining creativity, vision, emotion, and play. Buildings that can be virtually scaled, houses uprooted and suspended in mid-air, elevators that lead nowhere, escalators tangled like threads of a ball of yarn, unsettling and surrealist sculptures, videos that upend the ordinary. So many elements that narrate the everyday within an extraordinary context — where everything is different from what it seems, where one's sense of reality and perception of space dissolve.

As the artist himself notes: "I like to present myself as a conceptual artist working in the realm of the real and of perception. My subject is reality, symbols, and the potential of meaning. I strive to create a body of work — above all in public space — that opens the imagination, alters normality, reframes representation, and proposes actions that construct and deconstruct situations in order to disturb reality. Broadly speaking."

Each installation creates a perceptual short circuit: first familiar, then inexplicable. Viewers find themselves doubting their own senses, caught in an experience that is surprising, playful, and deeply poetic. It is precisely this active participation that completes the work.

Erlich's works have already set record audience figures worldwide across Asia, Latin America, and Europe, thanks to complex, spectacular site-specific installations that are rarely brought together in a single exhibition.

The exhibition runs until September 6 at Grand Palais, Avenue Winston Churchill, Paris, France.