For the thirteenth consecutive year, the Fondation Loo&Lou for contemporary art is taking part in Nuit Blanche. For this 25th edition, themed around love by artistic director Barbara Butch and taking place on June 6, the Foundation presents an original project by Mathias Kiss at the Petit Palais — Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris.

Titled Liquid Mirror, Mathias Kiss presents a site-specific installation conceived in dialogue with the building's 1900 architecture. This invitation marks the Fondation Loo&Lou's second participation in Nuit Blanche's artistic programming, following Côte 15.28: l'amour déborde, a monumental work by Pierre Delavie presented in 2016 on the façade of the Conciergerie.

LIQUID MIRROR

Mathias Kiss's installation at the Petit Palais takes the form of a surface of fragmented mirrors, made up of square modules that seem to liquefy and move through space.

Organized along a rigorous grid, this reflective and rigid material nevertheless behaves in a fluid way: it descends, unfolds, and extends onto the floor as if the monument itself were set in motion. The fragmentation into modules evokes the logic of the pixel, the smallest unit of the digital image.

Kiss thus transposes into this heritage space a syntax specific to the technological era: the pixel leaves the screen to become architectural matter. Where architecture asserts stability and permanence, Liquid Mirror suggests a transitional state — the monument does not transform, but seems momentarily crossed by a luminous phenomenon.

Positioned along the axis of Georges Picard's allegory Le Triomphe des femmes, the installation enters into dialogue with it. Where the painted work rises, this one offers a luminous fall; where it presents a unified figure, this one offers a multiplied presence.

The mirror does not offer a new image: it captures the present. Visitors appear fragmented, layered, integrated into the work.

Through the lens of this 25th edition's theme, love, the work becomes a relational experience. Love is not illustrated, but manifests itself in the shared reflection, in the overlapping of silhouettes, in the presence of the other within one's own image.

MATHIAS KISS

Mathias Kiss, a French visual artist of Hungarian descent, was born in 1972 in Poissy. He lives and works in Paris.

Trained in painting and the restoration of Historic Monuments (Musée du Louvre), he reinvents classical codes to sculpt spaces that challenge perception.

Since 2008, he has developed a distinctive body of work — Miroir Froissé, série 90°, Sky Painting, Besoin d'air — exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, the Mobilier National, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille.