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The new Monumenta* installation event at the Grand Palais in Paris caused quite a stir. And with good reason - the main space of this landmark exhibition hall hosts the hugely spectacular Leviathan by plastic artist Anish Kapoor**.

The fourth edition of Monumenta gave a free hand to British artist Anish Kapoor whose sensational 2002 revisiting of Greek mythology at the Tate Gallery, in London is now followed by this new biblically-inspired work. The blood-red structure made up of panels of a composite polyester/PVC textile, was made possible by the cutting-edge technical expertise of French textile manufacturers Serge Ferrari.

We met with Ferrari’s Architecture Division manager Françoise Fournier and colorimetry engineer Pascal Martor.

Serge Ferrari is well known as a manufacturer of coated polyester fabrics normally for industrial uses. How did you come to put your know-how to work for a renowned artist like Anish Kapoor?

About ten years ago, Anish Kapoor contacted Tensys, one of our design offices in Great Britain, for a monumental work he was preparing composed of stretched canvases for the Tate Gallery. After the design study, we naturally put ourselves up to manufacture this first "monster" called Marsyas. He liked what we did, and so we were able to continue working together.

Its huge size aside, Leviathan consists of four ovoid modules. How do you make something like that in fabric?

It isn’t just any old fabric. It’s a composite material manufactured by the patented “Précontraint®” (prestressed) technology which applies the same continuous tension to both the warp and weft*** of the fabric. It’s a composite of woven polyester fibres coated with a PVC resin specially formulated by our chemists. One of the key properties of this material is its uniformity and exceptional form retention. Whatever type of stress is put on it, the material almost cannot be pulled out of shape. And the mechanical stresses in Leviathan can vary up to fivefold in different places! Précontraint® just totally “absorbs” them, so there was no need to add metallic reinforcements to keep it rigid.

*** A fabric is an interlacing of warp threads (running lengthways) and weft yarns (running widthways).

And yet it’s a quite flexible material. How did you manage to achieve that without metallic reinforcements?

That was done by the Tensys design office which optimised the shape and cut of the widths, and Hightex which manufactured it and put it all together.
That was no easy job because it is a highly complex structure! The sculpture consists of four separate parts manufactured in specialised finishing shops. These parts were then welded together in the Grand Palais. Each one measures between three and four thousand sq.m. Once this was done, Leviathan was inflated using powerful compressors, which took about two hours.

To compensate for the natural escape of air from the antrum of the structure, a pressure sensor was fitted which sends regular signals to a compressor which starts up as soon as it falls to the minimum level. Deflation will also take several hours, so there is no risk of visitors being sucked into the biblical monster should any of the seals fail!

Another thing is that visitors get blown away by the intense colourful luminosity of the structure’s interior. Presumably the PVC used has something to do with that. Can you tell us more about how this was achieved?

It was one of Anish Kapoor’s requirements. He wanted visitors, once inside, to get a feeling of transparency. He wanted the metal structure of the Grand Palais’ glazing to be reflected in it in an interplay with a completely different light every hour. The artist chose red to represent the bowels of the beast. So we set about recreating that transparency effect by selecting the appropriate pigments and then carefully measuring out exactly the right balance of concentrations. It’s only the PVC that is dope-dyed, so we had to do a lot of in-lab testing over several months.

The challenge was to make the work opaque for visitors looking at it from the outside but give an impression of transparency for those inside. The artist wanted to create an unusual experience, for people to feel as if they were absorbed by the monochromatic colour. So the colour was as important as the form for him.

The work was created for a place and an event, so it is ephemeral by design. Do you know what is going to happen to the 12 000 sq.m. of composite used to make it?

Not really, because that’s something for Anish Kapoor to decide. Maybe we’ll see it again somewhere else. But if it were to be scrapped, we could recycle it using a process we developed - Texyloop® - which allows us to recycle and reprocess every bit of the material. We’re proud of what we have created, but at least as proud of the recycling solutions we can offer to give them a second life, and again, that’s a real industrial challenge.

Monumenta

* A visionary artistic event, unparalleled in the world, organised by the Ministry of Culture and Communication, Monumenta offers different internationally-renowned contemporary artists each year an opportunity to pit themselves against the monumental main space of the Grand Palais by creating an entirely new work.
Guest artists and their works:
2007 : Anselm Kiefer, Falling Stars
2008 : Richard Serra, Promenade
2010 : Christian Boltanski, People

Anish Kapoor

** Anish Kapoor is a British sculptor of Indian origin (born on 12 March 1954 in Bombay, India). He studied in England, first at the Hornsey College of Art, and later, at the Chelsea School of Art. In the early 1980s, Anish Kapoor formed part of the New British Sculpture art scene, gaining international recognition. His work is rooted in psychoanalytic and spiritual reflection. Deeply engaged with the metaphor of emptiness, his pieces are frequently curved monochromatic figures around concave and convex forms. His works can be found in the collections of leading contemporary art museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, Fondazione Prada in Milan, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the De Pont Foundation in the Netherlands and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan...