Tadao Cern’s French Exit hangs a wheat field overhead and leaves it in the care of others

A “French exit” means leaving without saying goodbye. In our shared imagination, leaving has one familiar picture: we rise and float above the world we leave behind. It appears in dreams, in films, in the way people describe death and on countless postcards of a soul drifting away.

The image has long since become a cliché. French Exit, an installation by artist Tadao Cern, starts from exactly that cliché.

A wheat field on the ceiling

The installation fills the ceiling with a dense field of dried wheat. Looking up from below, visitors see the field as if from above, as though they were already floating over it. In effect, the ceiling and the ground switch places.

Cern chose wheat for the same reason he chose the floating image. It is the most familiar thing we could be leaving: bread, harvest, homeland, the landscape of childhood. Few things hold such a strong place in our sense of belonging, and few are so ordinary.

Building the obvious at full scale

Banality sits at the centre of the work. Cern does not avoid the obvious image. Instead, he builds it at full scale and lets visitors stand inside it. As a result, something everyone recognises becomes physical, quiet and strangely unsettling.

The ceiling, usually the most neutral surface of a building, becomes the main event. Meanwhile, the floor stays empty.

A work that needs someone to stay

French Exit cannot exist on its own, and Cern designed it that way. It needs an institution: a space, a structure strong enough to carry it, people to install it and someone to care for it while it is on view.

Dried wheat is fragile. It sheds, settles and changes during the exhibition, so the host has to live with that process and maintain it. The artist creates the conditions and then leaves, while the institution stays with the work. In this sense, French Exit performs its own title: a work about leaving that depends completely on those left behind.

Artist, space and institution

This relationship between artist and institution lies at the centre of Cern’s practice. He trained as an architect and grew up during the collapse of the Soviet system. Since then, he has been drawn to structures of every kind: political, institutional and social. However, he is less interested in the moment they fall than in the quiet, anxious work of keeping them standing.

Each new version of French Exit adapts to its host building, its scale, its light and the way people move through it. Each time, artist, space and institution renegotiate their relationship. So far, Cern has realised French Exit in versions in Lithuania, France, China and the United States. For another field of wheat brought indoors, see how WHAC brings a wheat field into an office building in Perth.

Sketches and schemes

Project Credits

Work: French Exit
Artist: Tadao Cern / @tadaocern
Material: Dried wheat
Versions: Lithuania, France, China, United States
Images and renderings: Tadao Cern