The Sound of Silence

Imagine the sound of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo’s brain waves as he tries to conjure up the most beautiful guitar solo ever. That’s the soundtrack to Loris Gréaud’s One Thousand Ways to Enter (2011), a film of Rorschach-like clouds of smoke undulating slowly underwater. The piece is one of six in “The Unplayed Notes,” Gréaud’s first solo show at the Pace Gallery in New York, which runs through June 7. One Thousand Ways encourages subjective wanderings in a wide-open field of interpretation, and, like other works by the 33-year-old Paris-based artist, it never puts the meaning out front. “Art is what makes things more opaque,” says Gréaud, who mentions another work that translates the words of postmodern precursor Maurice Blanchot’s novel Thomas the Obscure into gusts of air. “Sometimes the thing we don’t say is rather more important than the thing we do say.” Speaking, however, is crucial to another Gréaud production released this month. His film Snorks: A Concert for Creatures is narrated by David Lynch and Charlotte Rampling, and has a soundtrack created for deep-sea creatures created by the band Anti-Pop Consortium, who will tour with the project and perform live in Paris, New York, London, and elsewhere.