Masterpieces from the Beaux-Arts de Paris collection and contemporary art works.

An exhibition designed by Beaux-Arts de Paris new department "Exhibition-related careers". "Exhibition-related careers" is a new professionalization program, offered to 3rd year students of Beaux-Arts de Paris, designed in partnership with Palais de Tokyo.

Frac Île-de-france, the castle / Cultural Park of Rentilly - Michel Chartier

Jean-Michel Alberola, Ismaïl Bahri, Evgen Bavcar, Hicham Berrada, Christian Boltanski, Xavier Boussiron, Flora Bouteille, Pierre Louis Deseine, Jean Baptiste Désoria, Marcel Duchamp, Albrecht Dürer, Nina Galdino, Matthias Garcia, Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty, Théodore Géricault, Francisco de Goya, Graham Gussin, Lucien Hervé, Hans Holbein the Younger, Pierre Huyghe, Claire Isorni, Ann-Veronica Janssens, Christian Lhopital, Marc Lochner, Antoine Marquis, Bernhard Martin, Romain Moncet, Damien Moulierac, Alicia Paz, Benoît Pype, Valentin Ranger, Hugues Reip, Bettina Samson, Pierre-Alexandre Savriacouty, Alain Séchas, Valérie Sonnier, Victor Yudaev, Tereza Zelenková...

In reference to the famous theme cabaret installed at the end of the 19th century in Montmartre, which deployed its parodic and funereal atmosphere by playing with a sulphureous irony of macabre situations, Frac Île-de-France and Communauté d'Agglomération de Marne et Gondoire present, at Château de Rentilly, "Le Cabaret du Néant", an exhibition designed by Beaux-Arts de Paris new department "Exhibition-related careers", which associates contemporary artists with masterpieces of Beaux-Arts de Paris collection.

From the tragic to the parodic, depending on the evolution of society and its morals, religious convictions as well as scientific discoveries, the subject "remember that you are going to die" runs through art and literature. Since the famous macabre dances appeared in the 15th century, it has never ceased to challenge the public and creators, while undergoing profound transformations. Contemporary to the famous "Cabaret du Néant" installed in 1892 on Boulevard de Clichy (18th arrondissement), which gives the exhibition its title, the notion of nothingness has another interpretation, another vision of the same abyss, no less terrible but plastically reversed; that which, in the wake of Mallarmé, leads us to consider human life as "vain forms of matter (…) necessarily rushing into the dream that it knows not to be (…) and proclaiming, before the Nothing that is the truth, these glorious lies!". According to Mallarmé, the role of the port, and therefore the art, consists in drawing man out of this "Nothing", as it from the bottom of a shipwreck, through the supreme game of creation.

Frac île-de-france, the castle
Rentilly Cultural Park - Michel Chartier 
1, rue de l'Étang 
77600 Bussy-Saint-Martin 
T +33 (0)1 60 35 46 72 
fraciledefrance.com

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