The Palais de Tokyo's summer exhibitions, 2023

The Palais de Tokyo has no air-conditioning, and some of its galleries have glass roofs, so in the summer the place can get very hot. I well remember, during Prince.sse.s des Villes, the sprawling summer exhibition of 2019, it was stifling. It has, however, an abundance of labyrinthine, relatively rarely-used underground spaces in bare concrete. The drop from the avenue in front of the Palais to the streets at the back, at river level, is considerable. (The long flights of stairs are familiar to me from visits to the Iranian embassy's visa department.) I've no idea how many buried levels the building actually has. Anyway, this year, the curators have had the clever idea of going down nearly as deep as possible, creating a new pathway starting at least two floors below street level, where it's dark and cool. Exhibition halls on the main and upper floors aren't used at all; only the ticket offices, shop and restaurant are still open. Guards and visitors can all be grateful for it.

Three of this summer's exhibitions - four in all, unless I missed something - at the Palais de Tokyo recalled thoughts I had at the Athens Biennale in 2021, about the impact of unusual exhibition spaces and expert curating on that of the works exhibited. Some of the things on display also recalled my impressions on visiting Theaster Gates' Amalgam in the same museum in 2019.

In Athens, what struck me was how the fascination an unusual space can exert, combined with sophisticated curating, may risk distracting from, even overpowering, the works on show. Today, I certainly remember that Biennale's spaces (a disused department store, an old courthouse and gaol, an abandoned office block) and how they were used better than much of what was inside. In the case of Gates, I felt that the sleek, clean, careful, even 'deluxe' presentation risked undermining the seriousness of his content, sucking out the drama and reducing the works almost to high-end interior design statements.

Lara Lamiel's big exhibition, Vous les entendez?, in a cool basement resembling an underground car park, begins with quite an unsettling, faintly menacing installation of sharp surgical-style instruments and glistening, broken glass (inevitably, you imagine yourself walking across it, barefoot), all carefully, icily lit, and expanded by a wall of mirrors at the rear. (Not far away, a balcony view of a large video screen installed in another room, one floor down, demonstrates that, even at this low level, there's still more Palais beneath. What a building it is.)

However, my feeling, as I advanced through the exhibition, was that, as with Gates, the meticulous positioning of the objects, the careful mise en scène, the colour coordination, clever lighting and reflections... relieved the works of mystery or menace. They were intriguing, curious, sometimes faintly worrying, sometimes witty... but in the end only mildly engaging. We were in a handsome installation of obviously well thought-out work, but somewhere on the borderline (admittedly an interesting one, worthy of investigation) between art and design. Even the way the paintings, which I liked a lot, were displayed turned the cool, concrete rooms into chic places you might like to live in - as if, even in temperate Paris, we might have cool, underground summer apartments, like the palaces in Iran's torrid desert cities.

This 'designer chic' feeling was even stronger one floor up in the installation Morphologies Souterraines, by Mountaincutters - like Vous les entendez?, conceived expressly to interact with the space it was installed in. Here, an artist I love but will not name went so far as to say he could discern no actual content in it at all. Just, again, careful (to the point of being anal-retentive; even the patches of decay looked carefully contrived) displays of a variety of materials and objects, both found and custom-made, with a trendy, vaguely industrial and ultimately fake (e.g. copper piping going nowhere, doing nothing) feel.

The introduction to curator Hugo Vitrani's Il morso delle termiti, another level up, says:

'Here graffiti is neither a subject nor an aesthetic but rather an experience, an attitude, an imaginary, an underground current of thought : an experience of illegality and broken windows, the wanderings of bodies in movement, an attraction to murky perspectives, the romanticism of a kind of vandalism which is as much a form of care as of damage, and a fascination for visible and invisible languages that confront the precarious matter of the real and which shape themselves from it even as they transform it.'

Using large-scale timber constructions (that permeate the place with their freshly-sawn smell), as in Prince.sse.s des Villes, the exhibition is intended to recall city streets with their shop fronts, signs and billboards.

Like his colleagues, Hugo Vitrani is a highly professional curator, and I like the way he brings together known and unknown artists without any sense of conventional art-world hierarchy or validity: he has his interests, ideas and objectives, and pursues them regardless and at some risk: Prince.sse.s des Villes was not universally admired. The danger, this time, was that his 'urban' concept, worked through in its solid, geometric framework of bright new wood and with the selected, in theory edgy artworks carefully positioned and picked out in skilful lighting, risked - as at the Athens Biennale - overpowering the works. The installation came perilously close to resembling a very high-end, very trendy art shop - especially when some of the pieces on display were tee-shirts on hangers.

Still, there were some nice works. I especially liked a little piece by, I think, Lisa Signorini, that would fit nicely into my new bathroom hanging scheme. I was also delighted to be surprised by one of Tala Madani's Shit Mom videos playing in the furthest reaches of the labyrinthine show.

Up at what is usually one of the lowest levels in the Palais' exhibitions, with daylight now streaming in, is L'être, l'entre et l'autre, another carefully laid-out assemblage of works, mainly but not only textiles, by Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien. I've seen her work before and liked it. This was no exception, only there was much more of it, and I was particularly impressed by the two vast curtains installed at the top of the stairs leading back up to the exit, at street level. My artist friend and I wondered what happened to such large fabric pieces after an exhibition. They'd make marvellous curtains for a theatre or opera house.