Des lignes de désir presents the twenty-eight artists who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris with a Diplôme National Supérieur d'Arts Plastiques and a Congratulations from the Jury in 2023.

The exhibition, curated by Emilie Villez, reflects the diversity of the artistic proposals that have emerged from the School. Paintings, sculptures, installations and videos coexist with performance and publishing practices, presented through a weekly programme.

Lines of desire, also known as paths of free will, are gentle challenges to the system, traced out in the landscape by the erosion of humans or animals as they walk. Criticism of the excesses of modernity is a subtext for the artists presented.

Getting off the beaten track, while finding one's place in the art ecosystem: the aim of the exhibition is above all to present the public with a panorama of contemporary artistic practices, opening up avenues of resonance and reflection on art and the world today.

Events will be held every week, with details of the programme to follow on beauxartsparis.fr.

To coincide with the opening on 23 January, Rose Bourdon will be presenting an inaugural performance: DIPLÔMÉ.ES is a collective play in which five École Centrale Paris students play the first-person roles of alumni whose lives and testimonies have been collected during telephone calls over the past few months. The actors each wear an 'alloro trionfale' laurel wreath that distinguishes them from the rest of the audience, a popular symbol of the graduation rite. The testimonies are documented and archived in an edition produced by Margot Bernard.

A publication accompanies the exhibition.

Félicités 2023

Of the 96 students graduating in 2023, 28 were awarded Congratulations by the jury made up of Eva Barois de Caevel,
exhibition curator, Sébastien Gökalp, director of the Musée national de l'histoire de l'immigration, Claire Le Restif,
director of the Centre d'art contemporain d'Ivry - Le Crédac, Mélanie Matranga, artist, Elena Sorokina, curator and art historian
and art historian, Stéphane Thidet, artist, and Emilie Villez, curator.

Carl AMIARD, Raphaëlle BENZIMRA, Joséphine BERTHOU, Thomas BESSET, Rose BOURDON, Marion CHAILLOU, Béryl COULOMBIÉ, Arthur DUJOLS-LUQUET, Yanma FOFANA, Milana GABRIEL, Thibault HISS, Nina JAYASURIYA, Louis LANNE, Louise LE PAPE, Sehyoung LEE, Marc LOHNER, Amandine MASSÉ, Pierre MÉRIGOT, Elise NGUYEN QUOC, Théo PALL, Océane PILASTRE, Margot POISSON, Victor PUŠ-PERCHAUD, Valentin RANGER, Sofia SALAZAR ROSALES, Gabrielle SIMONPIETRI, Anna STELLITTANO, Antonia TIETZE

Curated by

Emilie Villez is an exhibition curator. She is interested in artistic and curatorial methodologies, the construction of institutions and their ecosystems. Her practice creates relationships between practitioners of different generations and geographies, using various media and adopting decentralisation as a method.

Director of the KADIST foundation in Paris from 2013 to 2023, she has developed a programme of solo and group exhibitions in Paris and in international partner institutions, with guest artists and curators from all regions. She has also contributed and continues to enrich the foundation's collection by acquiring works by emerging and established artists.

Catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication of a catalogue.
Forewords by Alexia Fabre and Emilie Villez.
Interviews with each of the artists by art critics Marjorie Bertin, Aurore Forray, Henri Guette, Emmanuelle Luciani, Camille Paulhan and Anne-Laure Péressin, with 4 pages devoted to each Félicité-e.

Programme around the exhibition

Press coverage

Les Inrocks "28 young artists weave their web at the Beaux-Arts de Paris"

Libération "Félicités 2023": graduates of the Beaux-Arts de Paris show off their fine designs"

L'Humanité "Sculpture, short films, performance: the next generation of artists on show at the Beaux-Arts de Paris"

Beaux Arts Mag 5 Paris Beaux-Arts graduates who blew us away

Affiche - Des lignes de désir - Exposition Félicités 2023

RESPONSIBLE TICKETING

2, 5 or 10 €, the choice is yours!

The ticket office in charge invites each visitor coming to discover an exhibition at the Beaux-Arts de Paris to choose his or her entrance ticket from among 3 proposed rates: 2 €, 5 € or 10 €. Contribute according to your means, your passion and your desire for commitment!

Free of charge (on presentation of a valid receipt):

• under 26 years old

• students and teachers of the National Higher Schools of Art and Architecture of the Ministère de la Culture

• students from member institutions of the University of Paris-Sciences-et- Lettres (PSL)

• students of the École du Louvre

• holders of the Ministère de la Culture card

• Amis des Beaux-Arts de Paris

• card holder : Maison des Artistes, ICOM, ICOMOS, Association française des commissaires d’exposition (CEA)

• journalists

• jobseekers, recipients of minimum social benefits

• civilian disabled and war-disabled (with an attendant)

This exhibition inaugurates a reflective program implemented by the Beaux-Arts de Paris curatorial team to put into perspective the singular present of this school-museum
of this school-museum by its equally unique history, which was also the foundation of museum thinking in France.

Based on a dozen emblematic figures - architect, curator, donor - La Fabrique des collections illustrates the main stages in the creation of a heritage that continues to nourish the imagination of young artists. From the Royal Academy to the second half of the 20th century, this exhibition reveals a little-known and now largely imperceptible history, embodied by colorful characters and paved with seminal anecdotes. Combining objects of different kinds, works and archives, within a common narrative framework, the exhibition takes a resolutely contemporary approach.

The collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris owe a great deal to Alexandre Lenoir, a painter and art critic who created the first museum dedicated to French art, called the Musée des Monuments Français, on the future site of the École. The monumental elements that remained when this museum closed, together with the collections inherited from the Royal Academies, formed the core of the "Musée des Études", built by the architect Félix Duban and designed by the École's first curator, Louis Peisse. The museum's subsequent development was driven by Eugène Müntz, who initiated the inventory, and Wanda Bouleau-Rabaud, the first female curator at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

The museum is also founded on generosity, thanks to the influx of several hundred bequests and donations whose content and motivations are extremely varied: former students of the École, such as the architect Joseph Michel Lesoufaché or the engraver Jacques Edouard Gatteaux; political figures such as Victor Schoelcher; little-known philanthropists, such as Célestine Chenavard, or collectors in love with an atypical place, such as Jean Masson or Mathias Polakovits. Each, in their own way, has contributed to the collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Some forty works, most of them previously unpublished, will be on show. These include a sanguine by Charles Le Brun in preparation for a Mai de Notre-Dame, a drawing by Ingres, a miraculous survivor of the Commune fires, and a youthful pen-and-ink sketch by Georges Rouault. Unexpected works will also be on view, including a print on the abolition of slavery by David Lucas and the diary of the woman in charge of the École's collections during the events of May 68.

A catalogue is published for the occasion.

Curated by

Hélène Gasnault, Curator of Drawings, Estelle Lambert, Curator of Manuscripts and Prints, and Alice Thomide-Berrada, Head of Collections and Curator of Paintings, Sculptures and Objects at the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

"Treasures from the Beaux-Arts collection in Paris"- Libération

"The École des Beaux-Arts is grateful to its donors" - Le Figaro