Collective exhibition - Les Extatiques
Installation : Pour tes beaux yeux
Curator: Fabrice Bousteau
For the fourth consecutive year, "Les Extatiques" is back in the open air, in the heart of the La Défense district and around La Seine Musicale in the Hauts-de-Seine. The walk, which is entirely free, is punctuated by superb monumental sculptures - in fibreglass by Tony Cragg, in stainless steel balls by Cyril Lancelin or in perforated metal by Jean-Bernard Métais... But also by amusing installations: the chef Alain Passard imagines a giant whip, Lilian Bourgeat welcomes birds on six-metre-high desks and Jean-François Fourtou completely tips over a house!
Let's not forget the poet artists who distill a little of their delicate spirit in the city, such as Nils-Udo and his gigantic wicker flower, Stéphane Thidet and his charming "Pour tes beaux yeux", or Zadok Ben-David and his tree of human silhouettes... This programme, thought up by the editor-in-chief of Beaux Arts Magazine Fabrice Bousteau, gives pride of place to materials, inventions and crazy ideas. It is completed by a thematic exhibition on dance and ecstasy, i.e. reproductions of works and photographs to be discovered in a suite of old advertising panels at La Défense. A must-see!
"For the exhibition Les Extatiques, I looked at the ecstasy of love, and more precisely at what precedes it, seduction. I am particularly interested in the interaction between a work and the viewer. An attempt to destabilise, to attract, which sometimes leads to fascination. A work seeks to seduce the person to whom it is addressed, according to codes, clues, detours, the trappings of a common culture. The work addresses, courts, escapes, reveals or gives itself.
The work Pour tes beaux yeux, perched above an architecture, plays with the viewer by reflecting the landscape in which the one to whom it is addressed is located."
Interview by Stéphane Thidet, March 2021
