Sometimes, in museums, you feel watched. There, the eye of a white rhinoceros, here, of a charcoal chick; Elsewhere, the pupil of a great hulotte … All, they watch us, haunt us. The painter Romain Bernini dispersed all these eyes to Fontevraud: tiny paintings, they constitute as many stones sown on the magnificent course he composed there. The largest monastic site in Europe, this abbey has been adjusted with a museum since 2021. The two institutions have been customary from the white maps to the artists: they add a stratum to the nine hundred years of history of this monastery managed by abbesses, which became prison in the 19th centurye century, and today listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But, for the first time, museum and abbey unite to invite the same artist: this is the principle of the Zeugma, a program that Romain Bernini inaugurated with brilliance, imagining dizzying round trips between the two sites. He has spent several weeks here, soaking up silence, taming the richness of the museum. It is said to be a museum of modern art, but it’s going too fast. The legacy of the Cligman couple, which constitutes its fund, opens many other horizons: Greece, Congo, Iran marry with the windows. The artist played these alloys with delicacy, amazed by this eclecticism. “I worked more slowly than usual, I often had moments of stopping in the face of this complex past, these mixes offered by the collection: a history of art without hierarchy, transversal. This is what allowed me to include myself, to go to the interstices. »»
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