As a mise en abyme of the insular location of the Fondation Carmignac on Porquerolles, the exhibition explores an essential driver of creation, as powerful as it is common: the distancing of reality as to reveal an interiority. In the beginning are landscapes and bodies, landscapes in bodies then, as dreams often like to produce, a tangle of situation, situations that are blurry, pleasant, and sometimes disturbing. Faced with work acting as mirages, the gaze wanders.
More than 80 works by fifty artists, from private and public collections, including the Carmignac collection, but also new productions, will draw the dotted outlines of an inner island, inviting each visitor to fill in the gaps in their own way.
From Peter Doig to Anna-Eva Bergman, from Ali Cherri to Auguste Rodin, the exhibition proposes to confront visitors with these different worlds floating outside of known geographies and temporalities. The exhibition will feature archipelagos, as with Agnieszka Kurant’s installation sculpted by termites, under the water ceiling of the Villa Carmignac. Strange presences, human, animal, hybrid or supernatural, will populate the place, thanks to paintings by Andrew Cranston and Verne Dawson, as well as the sculptures by Francis Uprichard and Corentin Grossmann in the gardens. We will have to surrender ourselves : vertigo and tipping points await us in the either solar or crepuscular universes of Harold Ancart, Marcella Barceló, Tursic & Mille and Christine Safa.
Although the exhibition gives rise to a fictional, mental and abstract island, we are frequently reminded of the real Mediterranean island thanks to works which were created on Porquerolles more than a century ago (Jean-Francis Auburtin, Henri-Edmond Cross), a few years ago (Bernard Pesce, Bernard Plossu) or a few weeks before the opening (Darren Almond and Jennifer Douzenel).
The island’s energy, its suspended temporality and its fragility, produces these dialogues with works whose poetry is contagious, inviting us to change scales and ask ourselves about the creative gesture and its current scope.
