Larger than life

Richard Serra, approaching 70, strides ahead of me, light-footed and full of purpose. Pushing open an unlocked fire door in a corner of the restaurant in the Grand Palais, he leads me into the glorious, light-filled space beyond, one of the grandest architectural spaces in Paris, where his sculpture Promenade has just opened. Serra doesn't say anything. I blurt something unnecessary and stupid. As I take in the five sheer, commanding sheets of rusted steel that Serra has planted at regular intervals along this enormous space, each one reaching 17 metres into the 45 metre-high glass and ironwork dome, the artist turns and leaves, heading back to his lunchtime aperitif.

How sudden and decisive these steel plates feel, as if they had been stabbed into the concrete floor the moment we walked in. It takes a while to apprehend how mysteriously they choreograph the space, and our movements through it. As much as Serra deals with gravity, mass, weight, presence, a sense of the commanding and the impending, he also deals with duration, mental space and the unfolding of the physical experience in time and distance. But with the midday sun streaming through the roof, the whole space is a dazzle of light and shadow. It is difficult at first to comprehend what I am looking at: the walls, the floor and Serra's steel planes are zebra-striped in a camouflage of light and shadow. It feels like being trapped inside the gears of a solar clock. The iron art nouveau stairs and balcony writhe on one side. Later in the afternoon, when the sun is off the roof, the tension between the sculptural elements and the building reveal themselves and intensify. The skin of oxide on the milled corten steel softens to a grayish purplish glow. People down the other end of the building seem tiny, like the far-off figures in a Canaletto. Somewhere on the floor, dancers are rehearsing. Couples amble or walk apart pensively. Parents take photos of infants propped against tons of steel. Voices echo from far away.

Promenade is a single work that, to be absolutely correct, consists not just of what Serra has placed in the building, but also the architecture and the space itself, the light that falls, the people who wander and gather, talk and look. We accompany one another on our solitary journeys around the work. Serra did his work; we do ours.