Immersive installations have the power to suspend time, to pull viewers out of the present and into constructed worlds that feel both imagined and eerily familiar. For more than fifteen years, Eva Jospin has been refining this power, shaping monumental environments that resemble caves, forests, and forgotten architectures. Her latest solo exhibition, Grottesco, currently on view at le Grand Palais in Paris, marks one of her most ambitious and conceptually resonant projects to date.

In Grottesco, Jospin transforms humble cardboard into sprawling architectural fantasies inspired by ancient Rome. The result is an exhibition that feels at once archaeological and speculative—less a reconstruction of history than a meditation on how ruins, myths, and materials continue to shape human imagination.

From Roman Legend to Contemporary Immersion

The conceptual anchor of Grottesco lies in a Roman legend: a young man stumbles into a forgotten cave and uncovers the buried remains of Nero’s Domus Aurea, the lavish imperial palace sealed beneath the city for centuries. When Renaissance artists later descended into these underground chambers, they encountered frescoes where vegetation, architecture, and mythological figures intertwined, giving birth to the ornamental style known as the grotesque.

This narrative aligns uncannily with Jospin’s long-standing fascination with cavernous, organic forms. Yet while the historical reference feels inevitable, the execution is anything but predictable. The exhibition gathers more than fifteen large-scale works, each operating as a fragment of a fictional ruin: columns overtaken by creeping vines, domes that envelop visitors like hollowed stone shells, and petrified forests that suggest civilizations arrested mid-breath.

Cardboard as Architecture, Cardboard as Earth

Central to Jospin’s practice is her choice of material. Cardboard—often dismissed as disposable—becomes, in her hands, a medium capable of astonishing structural and emotional weight. Layered, cut, and carved with obsessive precision, it mimics stone, soil, bark, and masonry.

Its natural brown hue recalls earth and sediment, reinforcing the illusion that these structures have emerged organically from the ground. At the same time, cardboard’s inherent fragility introduces a quiet tension. These ruins look ancient, yet they are acutely vulnerable—susceptible to time, pressure, and decay.

Cardboard was everywhere in my studios, and became an accessible and transformable material. It allows me to create durable works while expressing a certain vulnerability that reflects the relationship to living things and nature.

– Jospin explains.

Sustainability, impermanence, and resilience converge in a single substance.

New Techniques: Where Textile Meets Stone

Among the most striking surprises in Grottesco are Jospin’s embroidered bas-reliefs, a new direction in her practice. Here, textile and sculpture merge, softening the rigidity of architectural forms while deepening their tactile allure. These works blur boundaries—between craft and monument, intimacy and scale—expanding Jospin’s visual language without abandoning its core obsessions.

Throughout the exhibition, surfaces teem with detail. Vines coil endlessly, grooves accumulate like geological strata, and shadows nestle into crevices. The eye is never allowed to rest; perception becomes an act of slow excavation.

Dialoguing with the Grand Palais

While Grottesco draws heavily on ancient Rome, it is also deeply responsive to its contemporary setting. The arches and domes of the Grand Palais echo Jospin’s own constructions, creating a rhythmic dialogue between institutional architecture and sculptural fiction.

Notably, Jospin chose to leave the gallery’s windows uncovered, allowing daylight—and Paris itself—to intrude upon the illusion. Visitors are prevented from fully forgetting where they are. Antiquity and modernity coexist in uneasy proximity, reinforcing a recurring tension in Jospin’s work: fantasy is never allowed to eclipse reality entirely.

Spaces to Enter, Mysteries to Revisit

Jospin describes her installations as spaces to inhabit, rather than messages to decode. Visitors are invited to wander, linger, and lose themselves in detail. Meaning emerges through experience, not instruction.

My works offer a journey towards an inexplicable and inexhaustible source. We never find it, and it’s this mystery that brings us back to it.

– She reflects.

In Grottesco, that mystery is amplified. These cardboard ruins feel ancient yet contemporary, solid yet precarious, mythical yet unmistakably human. By transforming an overlooked material into immersive architecture, Eva Jospin reminds us that history is never fixed—and that even the most fragile substances can carry the weight of time.

Eva Jospin: Grottesco is on view at le Grand Palais, Paris, through March 15, 2026.