LONG PROGRAM: "From Vermeer to Van Gogh, the Dutch masters"

This digital exhibition presents the genius of the painters of the North through a complete immersion in authentic paintings that are faithful representations of nature and its themes. The monumental basins are the perfect setting for a daydream along the Flemish canals. Spectators will explore the reality of daily life, following in the footsteps of the great masters who represented the ordinary inan extraordinary way.

Painting light and atmosphere is the exhibition’s main theme. Direct or subdued, cold or warm, the light reveals the facades and the privacy of family homes. Spectators will set sail and berth their boats in the cities and stroll around in Vermeer’s world, in which the inhabitants invite us to step into the canvas. Much like a filmmaker, Vermeer chose what to include inside the frame and created a world suspended in time. His canvases are like synopses that open the doors to an almost Hitchcockian mystery, in which the spectator becomes a part of the mise en scène.

Master of chiaroscuro, Rembrandt encourages the introspection. Night falls in the heart of the cathedrals, immersing the visitor in a spiritual atmosphere surrounded by biblical themes. An unrivalled portraitist who achieved a powerful realism, his Night Watch brings the procession of portraits to a climactic end. From Abraham Blommaert’s kingdom of the gods to Hendrick Avercamp’s expanses of ice, the seascapes by Hendrick Cornelisz Vroom and Jan Steen’s festive tavern scenes, the exhibition plunges us into the fascinating world of seventeenth-century Holland.

Van Gogh, a worthy successor to these seventeenth-century painters, takes us under the summer and night skies of the South of France. Using bright colours and imbuing his work with intense emotion, he sculpted the paint and sublimated the landscapes, self-portraits, and still lifes. Like a final colourful bouquet, the spectator is surrounded by nocturnal and dreamlike paintings, losing their way in the stars.

SHORT PROGRAM: "Mondrian, the architect of colours"

‘Nature moves me profoundly. Only I paint it in a different manner.’ Piet Mondrian

This immersive exhibition presents Mondrian’s iconic works, composed of squares of primary colour, which have long inspired artists of every kind and influenced pop culture. Graphic design, fashion, design, architecture, music… Mondrian created an aesthetic and timeless grammar that opened the way to abstraction.

What lies behind this apparent minimalism and these bright and bold paintings? In an interplay of horizontal and vertical lines and moving from the figurative to the abstract, this immersive exhibition follows the artistic development of the painter, who broke away from traditional painting and immersed himself in visionary painting: Neoplasticism.

Like his life, his art was permeated by the upheavals at the beginning of the twentieth century: the change from candlelight to fluorescent lighting; from Calvinist austerity to the emergence of a modern rhythmic music jazz; and from the linear Dutch landscapes to the dizzyingly high skyscrapers in Manhattan … Mondrian’s life is illustrated by these major opposing dynamics, which, once expressed on the canvas, find a perfect equilibrium, that is magnified by the monumental basins of Bassins des Lumières.

Naturalistic, Fauve, Pointillist, Cubist, Abstract… each period is gradually freed of the superfluous in order to express ‘general beauty’ in painting. This immersive experience, divided into five sections, retraces the path to visual simplification: the contrast of the Dutch sunsets, the power of colour that broke away from realism, the dynamics created by the lines that became rigid, the proportion of the surfaces in his Parisian studio, and the boundless energy of his work in New York.

Production: Culturespaces Studio ®
Artistic Direction: Virginie Martin
Staging and video animation : Cutback
Music supervision and mixing: Start-Rec

CONTEMPORARY CREATION: "Foreign Nature"

Production: Culturespaces Studio ®
Direction & Design: Julius Horsthuis
Music: Ben Lukas Boysen

In "Foreign Nature", Julius Horsthuis employs computer generated fractals to create a universe where mathematics and art coalesce seamlessly, where the secular and the spiritual harmonize, where the differences between the organic and the artificial, the macro and the micro all blend into a strange and unseen universe.

CONTEMPORARY CREATION: "Kaze, Tales of the wind"