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. Visitors explore the reality of daily life, following in the footsteps of the great masters who represented the ordinary in an 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 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 summery night skies of the South of France. Using bright colours and imbuing his work with intense emotion, he shapes the material and sublimates 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.
Artistic direction: Virginie Martin
Production and video animation: Cutback
Production: Culturespaces Studio®
Short program: ‘Mondrian, the architect of colours’
‘Nature moves me deeply. Only I paint it in a different manner.’ Piet Mondrian
The immersive exhibition presents Mondrian’s iconic works, made up of grids of primary colours, which have long inspired artists from all horizons and influenced pop culture. In graphics, fashion, design, architecture and music, Mondrian created an aesthetic and timeless theme that opened the way to abstraction.
What hides behind this apparent minimalism and this radiant painting? A universe of horizontals and verticals from the figurative to the abstract. This immersive exhibition offers to follow the artistic evolution of the painter, who freed himself from traditional painting to immerse himself in a visionary one: Neo-plasticism.
His art was influenced by the upheavals of the early 20th century: from candlelight to fluorescent lamps; from Calvinist austerity to the advent of rhythmic, modern music - jazz. From linear Dutch landscapes to the dizzying rise of Manhattan skyscrapers... Mondrian’s life is illustrated by these opposed dynamics which, once on canvas, find a perfect balance, magnified by the grandiose spaces of the Carrières des Lumières.
Naturalist, Fauvist, Pointillist, Cubist, Abstract, each period is gradually freed from the superfluous to achieve a painting in search of « general beauty ». This immersive experience, divided into five chapters, retraces this path towards visual simplicity. This includes the contrast of Dutch twilight, the power of colour that breaks with realism, the dynamics of the line that becomes rigid, the proportion of surfaces in his Parisian studio and the overflowing energy of the New York rhythm.
Artistic direction: Virginie Martin
Production and video animation: Cutback
Production: Culturespaces Studio®
