PAID ENTRY | Beaux-arts de Paris

The Centre des monuments nationaux and the Beaux-Arts de Paris are joining forces to present an exhibition entitled "The Witch, the Jester, the Sentinels, the Ghost and the Princess", produced by students in the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" programme in the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes. The curator is the student-artists of the course: Joséphine Berthou, Charline Gdalia, Jean-Baptiste Georjon and Clarisse Marguerite.

The Château de Vincennes is the ideal setting for this exhibition, which questions the symbolic characters of the tale and the stereotypes associated with this literary genre. Through this project, which uses the dungeon of the Château de Vincennes as a fictional setting, the students of the Beaux-Arts de Paris question the traditional narrative models of fairy tales and the collective memory. Throughout the visit, the spectator is plunged into a magical universe where contemporary art comments on the images created by centuries of history.

Each area of the castle is dedicated to a typical character from the tale: the chemin de la ronde, for example, is devoted to the figure of the sentry. 46 works by artists from the Beaux-Arts de Paris, selected in response to a call for projects, will be presented in a predefined format, with reference to the guards of Charles V. At the time, a hundred or so men in the service of the King populated the covered way. Together, they ensured his protection by preventing anyone from entering the keep. Today, the ghosts of these guards continue to inhabit the corridors...

Other works, inspired by archetypal figures, are scattered throughout the castle keep. The character of the witch appears on the "cursed lawn", the jester is embodied in the council chamber, the princess resides on the second floor of the tower and the ghost haunts the ground floor. Plastic and performance works meet and dialogue with each other, like the life-size game of geese drawn on the grass by Clarisse Marguerite, which will serve as the basis for Chloé Poitevin's performance on the opening day. The giant board will allow her to draw the contours of her magical universe, where, through a work on costume and its symbols, she will revisit the characters of the tale to activate their stereotypes.

Artists exhibited: Juliette Barthe, Amélie Bigard, Joséphine Berthou, Sacha Cambier, Caroline Delhom, Nathan Ghali, Charline Gdalia, Jean-Baptiste Georjon, Anna Giner, Yvan Ivanovic, Maya Kafian, Léa Le Floch, Lena Long, Clarisse Marguerite, Nicole Mera, Nos Lèvres Révoltées, Chloé Poitevin, Loïs Saumande, Alisson Schmitt, Liv Schulman, Masha Silchenko

Practical information

Château de Vincennes
1 avenue de Paris, 94300 Vincennes
Reservation recommended on the website http://www.chateau-de-vincennes.fr/

Full price ticket: €9

Exhibition to be found on latlas.beauxartsparis.fr, the virtual gallery of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, with an exclusive interview of the artist Jean Bedez and the curator Emmanuelle Brugerolles.

Due to the latest government regulations the exhibition Jean Bedez, De Sphaera Mundi is not open to the public at the moment. For the moment, it is open by appointment only to professionals in the strictest respect of sanitary conditions.

The exhibition “De sphaera mundi – Sur la sphère du monde” is an opportunity to present a set of new works by the artist, including an eponymous series made in 2019, as well as three exceptional works created for the occasion. It offers a cosmic exploration revisiting myths, in resonance with the Beaux-Arts de Paris collections.

Jean Bedez's graphite mine drawings offer representations of the contemporary world that function as modern allegories: between political and religious power, entertainment culture or the role of the citizen, they explore the relations of domination in our societies.

The series of drawings “De Sphaera mundi” confronts 12th century planispheres from Gerard of Cremona's The Theory of the Planets with images of a comet observed by the space probe Rosetta; medieval cartographies are telescoped to the latest space technology. The three large drawings are inspired by a sculpture by Michelangelo, dated around 1530 and very damaged by time, representing the battle of Hercules against Cacus. In the works of Jean Bedez, the great Hercules, making Cacus bite the dust, becomes dust himself again. His right arm, the very one that holds his fetish weapon, has disappeared. Ruin wins him, light and darkness clash into a chaotic landscape. It is this damaged, fragile Heracles that Jean Bedez evokes, at least his mediocre aptitude to reach us intact, faithful to himself, the owner without concession of the incredible power which had fallen to him. But mythology is not the only business of the artist, each motif echoes an alchemical, astrophysical, political, poetic, esoteric reality. This is what his works show, the details of an infinite cosmogony and labyrinth that is only at its beginnings.

Graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2001, Jean Bedez was awarded the Lucien Quintard artistic prize for painting, in 1999, at the Stanislas academy in Nancy for a conceptual graphic work questioning the notion of autograph work and the relationship to Time. Both a sculptor and a draftsman, he has exhibited at the CRAC Languedoc Roussillon, Suzanne Tarasiève Gallery, Albert Baronian Gallery, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Palais de Tokyo.