A third-year student at Beaux-Arts de Paris, Ingrid Portal is the winner of a third call for projects organised by the Ministry of Culture, in partnership with Beaux-Arts de Paris, as part of the restructuring of its Parisian premises across three sites: Rue de Valois, Rue des Bons-Enfants and Rue des Francs-Bourgeois.
Les Voies du regard is a vast mural stretching across the two walls of a 110-metre-long underground corridor, leading to the ministry’s training rooms and the Sonia Delaunay Council Chamber, where the Acquisitions Committee of the French Museums Service, amongst others, holds its meetings.
The artist invites us to take a “breath so that the gaze may regain its openness. This journey acts as a threshold of adjustment, a space that places the body and the mind in the right frame of mind for seeing. As in Plato’s myth of the cave, the viewer leaves the clarity of the tangible world to descend into an underground realm where the visible dissolves. Upon arriving at the Delaunay Gallery, where a critical and institutional gaze is cast upon the works, this journey becomes a sensory education in seeing, a preparatory ritual for decision-making.” – Ingrid Portal
Housed in the basement of the Quadrilatère des archives, located at 54 Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, Paris 3rd arrondissement, the work is created mainly using natural pigments collected by the artist-adventurer, who draws inspiration from her caving to recreate a living, sensory cave that echoes the very origins of art, namely the cave with its rock paintings.
Image credit: Project by Ingrid Portal, a third-year student, at the Ministry of Culture, Quadrilatère des archives © Antoine Ménard
