Situated in the 1st Arrondissement of Paris, right by Les Halles, the Bourse de Commerce is an imposing building, filled with some of the most renowned artwork in the world. After Francois Pinault was awarded a 50-year contract with the space back in 2016, he transformed it into an architectural masterpiece with the help of Tadao Ando. The space opened in May of 2021, delayed from the initial 2020 date due to Covid. Some people joke that he created this as a jab at Bernard Arnualt, his fashion billionaire rival, who opened the Fondation Louis Vuitton a couple years prior. Renovation costs totaled 200 million dollars. It is a space “dedicated to contemporary art.” Currently exhibited include the artists: David Hammond, Bertrand Lavier, Nobuyoshi Araki, Stan Douglas, and Charles Ray. The building is filled with many interesting details and quirks that will remain forever. The double helix staircases, although confusing at first, are a true masterpiece. They were originally designed back when the space was used to store corn. It allowed for workers carrying the heavy sacks of corn to go up one way, while the other workers went down using the other staircase. I also enjoyed doing a double-take when I noticed the pigeons perched above the rotunda.

Charles Ray’s exhibit is what really caught my attention. Taking up much of the rotunda as well as the second floor gallery space, Ray’s work dominates a good deal of the entire building. The realistic and meticulous detail in each piece is quite evident and all of them share a sense of autonomy while still being so connected in style. 

The piece that I gravitated most to was “Burger” (2020). The grand sculpture depicts a man sitting up-right on a stool. He is looking down at a burger half-eaten in his hands. He is wearing a T-shirt, some pants, and a pair of Nike sneakers. The entire piece is made of white fiberglass, though it looks like it’s carved from stone. The sheer size of the piece is what first drew me in, but then the exquisite details are what kept me lingering. The folds in the pants, the wrinkles in the shirt, the texture in the hair – all these very difficult facets of the piece amazed me. It was shocking to see the precision in the most fragile areas like the end of the pants or the fingers on the wrapping of the burger. There was also something very relatable about the piece. It was not some crazy act or stunt. It was simply a man with his cheeseburger. Many of Charles Ray’s pieces at the Bourse de Commerce had a “crazy factor” to them – this was one of the few that felt very real. It was also interesting how spread out the piece was from others. This was true for most of Ray’s pieces in the exhibit. There were many meters in between two of his pieces, as to not allow for any distraction when viewing one of them. After doing some research, I found out that this specific piece is meant to be an analogy to Eucharist. This was ironic to me because Ray is not a Catholic – he said though that Christianity as a philosophy really interested him. Eucharist, also known as Holy Communion, is a Christian rite considered a sacrament or ordinance, depending on the church. I find it quite interesting that Ray found a parallel in the burger with the bread and wine referring to the body and blood of Christ. 

Charles Ray was born in Chicago in 1953. Art was in his DNA as his grandmother founded an art school which his parents continued to run. He studied sculpture with Roland Brener, who showed Ray much of the progress with modernist sculpture. He began to work with many different mediums. The work that took him the longest, and one of his most famous, is “Hinoki” (2007). It took him ten years to complete the structure, from finding the fallen tree, to creating a mold, to finally finishing the sculpture. Fortunately for us, it is held at the Art Institute of Chicago. Before Ray began his figurative sculptures, he created sculptures of mannequins. The female dressed in a power suit is a piece made in 1992. We saw it on the second floor of the Bourse de Commerce. She has the exact ratios of a typical mannequin, the only difference is the scale. Like the man with the burger, she is much greater in scale – a grand 8 feet in height. Another of his most famous pieces is “Family Romance” made just a year after the female mannequin I just mentioned. It depicts four figures – a father, a mother, a son, a daughter – all standing side by side. They are all naked and all are around the same height. They are anatomically more detailed than any mannequin in a store would be, and the fact that their heights are the same also strays from how typical mannequins are displayed for younger vs older people. There is much Freudian allusion in this piece, both with the title and the subjects themselves. Each of the figures are clasping the hands of the family members adjacent. Their eyes look uniform which seems to take away from the soul each would have. The piece is made from fiberglass and is at the Museum of Modern Art.

An additional note – Something I did not learn till recently was that, though Ray envisioned and mapped out all of his work, the actual putting together/technical work was often carried out by a crew, especially in the most recent years. I wonder how this affects ideas of ownership and what art really is. My guess is that it only reinforces the idea that art is an essence or an expression more so than any physical thing.