Pierre Ardouvin’s art is best experienced, we read in the illuminating catalogue accompanying the first British exhibition of his work, “in the early hours of the morning, after a sleepless night, the twilight hour when the excitement subsides, when, exhausted, we think of how good it would feel to be tucked up in bed, but when at the same time all our senses are heightened”. What a lip-smackingly tempting proposition, and also — considering Ardouvin’s strange plans for Museum 52 in the East End of London — accurate.

Ardouvin, 51, a big name in France, where he has exhibited in Paris at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, the Palais de Tokyo and the Pompidou Centre, specialises in sculptural installations. At the Musée d’Art Moderne he hung rigid washing lines of clothes between the columns to disrupt the formal architecture and to reference cities such as Naples, where the grandeur of Fascist architecture was juxtaposed with extreme poverty.

Another piece, Love Me Tender, features a dodgem car abandoned in a space bounded by four beams while a slowed-down version of Elvis’s hit plays in the background. Ardouvin is nodding to lost adolescent nights spent in fairgrounds, while also playing with notions of display, and this car as a symbol of another era.

The most surprising thing, given their scale and eccentricity, is that Ardouvin plans each of these works through a series of watercolours. For his yet-to-be-finished structure at Museum 52, Ardouvin will construct a series of darkened rooms, the floors strewn with the detritus of a decadent party: chandeliers, jewellery, the floor glistening but also tacky with rubbish. The space is populated by the unseen voices of departed revellers, their whispering so thick that it sounds like running water. Sound “as a material and its effects on the perception of space” is a particular preoccupation of Ardouvin and figures in all his work. A set of works, In The Mix, feature kitschy old record players, their turntables furnished with a car, aircraft and tank.

Museum 52 says Ardouvin’s work is “not cynical but instead beautiful and melancholic representations of a world turned upside down so it can be perceived more clearly”. Or put another way: he is evoking that moment when the party’s over, this is the comedown — when the cold, harsh light of the day dulls the glittering edge of the night before, and euphoria is replaced by the humdrum or melancholic.

Ardouvin, who lives on the outskirts of Paris, says much of his work has been inspired by the suburbs, “an intermediate area where utopias, disillusion and monstrosities of urban planning projects, successive social and economic policies can all be seen at the same time”. One of his pieces, Crystal Palace, was filmed in the suburbs of Toulouse, a tracking shot “through a sleeping city” accompanied by hip-hop. Another piece, Le Creux de l’ enfer, was a metal structure of footbridges and stairways furnished with a heavy-metal soundtrack.

His eccentric work can be partially interpreted through a fairly hippyish-sounding childhood growing up in rural southeast France. “I spent a lot of time running around the countryside, building cabins and dreaming of adventure. At school I was very interested in history because we had to talk about a large illustrative image of a period — for example the Middle Ages — with many scenes on it. I was also interested by poetry because on the exercise book we wrote the poem on the left-hand page and drew an illustration on the right.”

From 14 to 16 Ardouvin attended special painting classes. His heroes were rebels: Magritte, Dalí, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Che Guevara, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin. He went to live in Paris at 24 and discovered Warhol and Joseph Beuys. He is friendly with other well-known installation artists such as Claude Leveque and Thomas Hirschhorn.

Much of Ardouvin’s work has a blankness about it, a sense of desertion and abandonment: Holidays, for example, is a burnt-out Ford Escort revolving on an invisible plinth. Inside the car a disco ball spins, sending off shards of white light. Michel Polnareff’s song Holidays plays backwards.

Ardouvin has said there is a “pessimistic”, politically motivated, element to this and other work such as Le bal des nazes, a half-building-site, half-dancefloor structure, its soundtrack a popular waltz scratchy with interference from feedback. “I belong to a generation which euphorically celebrated the arrival of the Left in power with Mitterrand and who found themselves 20 years later with Le Pen and Chirac in the second round of the presidential elections,” he says. “We are in a dangerous age with the rise to power of reactionary ideologies on all sides and I feel that we are heading straight for a brick wall.”

Memory is also key: “The references are not about ‘values’,” he says. “The world of childhood I evoke is rarely regressive or traumatic but is instead naive as if to say, ‘What’s happening? I don’t understand’.” So Il est assez confiant — an inflatable rubber ring shaped like a duck set on water, illuminated by spotlights, spun insanely round the pool of water by fans — “could refer to the experience of the child who ventures into the water with the rubber ring with more or less confidence in this object which is supposed to keep him afloat”. Such enchanting, though dark, work encapsulates Ardouvin himself: the innocent who knows too much.

Pierre Ardouvin: Back in Black is at Museum 52, 52 Redchurch Street, E2 (020-7366 5571; www.museum52.com), from Friday to Jan 14. Paris Calling: A Season of Contemporary Art from France continues in London, Oxford and Margate (www.pariscalling.org.uk)