Molecular Cloud

With Molecular Cloud, the Paris-based French artist Vincent Leroy imagines strange molecular clouds in the form of light, glossy inflatable objects floating above the vast green field of the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival. The artwork slowly, fluidly, and spectacularly changes, forming strange and organic shapes that reflect the revelry of the festival.

As you move closer to the massive mobiles, the reflective orbs fuse with the landscape in a hypnotic and phantasmagorical spectacle: The ground, people, and sky appear in Molecular Cloud’s mirrored surfaces, and the artwork plays with your perception and detaches you from reality.

Leroy, who produced his first kinetic works while studying industrial design at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle in Paris, oscillates between the real (natural) and virtual (artificial), drawing inspiration from both nature, which often sites his work, and the digital world. 

He is interested in experimenting with the phenomena of perception and has installed ethereal works in overlooked and uninhabitable places around the world. His recent Lenscape installation, for example, distorted the otherworldly landscape of Fjallsárlón, Iceland.

Movement is almost always Leroy’s focus — the kind of movement, he says, that “inspires life, amazement, and a permanently shifting viewpoint.” Leroy likes to slow this movement, reveal its fluidity and flexibility, and uncover and magnify the gaps that often go unnoticed in today’s frenetic pace and performance.

With Molecular Cloud, ripples, reflections, superimpositions, and the play of light plunge us into another dimension — light and airy, dreamlike, and meditative. The work also reflects Leroy’s studio practice, which relies on a subtle mix of poetry and technology to tweak our perceptions and untether us from reality — not only through visual experiences and moments that touch the soul.