Vos Chefs-d'oeuvre: Group exhibition

With a selection of artworks by:

The exhibition Your Masterpieces, like a cloisonné, combines about thirty works whose sole connection to each other is the exceptional character that their owner has given to them. To invite some thirty connoisseurs to each present what he or she considers to be the core of their collection; to avoid erudition and iconographical commentary and give voice to subjective appreciation, to the “experience of the sensitive” – this almost totemic phrase by Merleau-Ponty – to favour an emotio- nal escape only guided by eyes and senses.

The authors of the catalogue were invited to use this same point of view for the artworks: to give priority to the senses over the logical, cultivate the emotive eye, and by that, to incite the reader to look at the work through the text, not the text from the work, as if it were merely a commentary. The author allows the work to be seen inside, thus becoming its centre of gravity. There again, the traditional critical apparatus will not be proof; we prefer to see the intoxication in allowing the eye to circulate and order the development of the senses in the brain.

The scenography has been designed to reify the intention of this exhibition: make artworks, collec- tors and authors meet in a diffraction of the space that is created by a myriad of mirrors, like a life size kaleidoscope. A loss of cardinal points – the intoxication of the sensation felt at this multipli- cation of the real – is the first effect looked for. The second places the viewer in the middle of a mise en abyme of all the paintings which reflect, respond to each other infinitely, and which mingle by their superposition, juxtaposition, in an infinite weaving of perceptions.

“Landscape,” said Cézanne, “is thought up within me, and I am its conscience”. The appropria- tive meaning of Samuel Le Paire.