Download - Pinacothèque de Paris

SCENOGRAPHY
Laurent Guinamard-Casati, Heritage architect
“Today, you may dare just about anything”, this is Gauguin’s advice, claiming,
like François Villon “the right to say everything”. This is indeed the main
characteristic of Art. Museums as well as exhibitions should never be
accountable to any commonplaces nor generally accepted ideas, including on
matters such as lighting or setting up paintings, otherwise they are likely to lose
them. They are on the contrary, under the obligation , if one may say so, to shout
their freedom and their right to be daring.
An exhibition is most often the connection between the intention of the curator
and the encounter with the public, with exceptional gatherings of masterworks
from all over the world, something which is only possible nowadays. Like Art, an
exhibit must induce a wish to discover them. As social phenomenon, the
exhibition adopts a new form of expression, a renewed means of communion
between the public and Art which excludes any elitism. The Tokyo Palace
exhibitions perfectly illustrate this movement.
The space dedicated to an exhibition is the place “par excellence” for and
exchange between a work of art and us. The Paris Pinacothèque will be above
all, a tool allowing this communion; and first and before all, a living space and
a sharing place.
For each exhibition I force myself to stretch out the frame of the collection in
order to better penetrate it. That is how we proceeded for Roy Lichtenstein. This
time, the first idea was to rebuild the living space of his studio. The second is to
progressively solicit memories from a painting to the other. The whole space
o rganisation must help this approach, by the means of transparencies,
highlights, or decisive memories. As far as I am concerned, architecture is
nothing but a transition between the different spaces which we keep in our
memories. The architect’s job is to provoke this recollection of different places.
Should there be a good and a bad architecture, the bad one would be the one
resembling a lifestyle which “would be reduced to successive moments of an ever
passing present”, according to Chateaubriand’s expression.
Secondly, my scenographies attempt to abolish “the useless complication of
forms” taking up Emilie Bernard’s idea, and immerging the visitor into a
dreamful and fabulous world.
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