The white balloons of French photographer Charles Pétillon are floating into Shanghai for “Invasions,” the artist’s debut exhibition in China, opening May 14 at Gallery Magda Danysz.For the show, Pétillon has created elaborate assemblies of his iconic white balloons, which he places in empty or abandoned spaces and then photographs. The results are stark tableaux of these ivory globules, which evoke soap bubbles frozen in space and time.Some of the images are set in landscapes, others in empty manmade environments. In “Mutations 2,” a twisted horizontal braid of balloons floats in the forest; in “Playstation,” balloons of different sizes are arrayed around a children’s jungle gym in a desolate park.The most haunting image in “Invasions” is “Souvenirs de Famille,” an exterior shot of a vacant house overflowing with Pétillon’s balloons. The house is at once full and empty, packed to the rafters with these white baubles that contain nothing but air. Pétillon calls his balloon works metaphors that he says are intended to “change the point of view on the places we see every day without really paying attention.”“Invasions” also features a site-specific installation of thousands of balloons arranged in a spiral around the 1,000-square-meter gallery. Visitors to the show will be enveloped in this vast creation, giving them the experience of entering what the gallery describes as “the vortex that is a never-ending life.”Pétillon last created a large-scale balloon installation at London’s Covent Garden Market, where he filled the building’s arched roof with 100,000 balloons. That sculpture was 50 meters long and 12 meters wide and pulsed with white light to the rhythm of a heartbeat.“Invasions” runs May 14-June 20 at Gallery Magda Danysz in Shanghai.
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