Le Violon d’Ingres

Scenography of the exhibition Le Violon d’Ingres, 2018-2019
Villa Medici. Rome. Italy.
Curated by Chiara Parisi and developed through a dialogue with the artist Christian Boltanski,
Client: Villa Medici - French Academy in Rome
Laurent P. Berger (scenographer)

Le Violon d’Ingres is an exhibition that pays tribute to the strength of Villa Medici’s heritage, with the desire to unite the art of the past with the contemporary one, in creating audacious and unexpected dialogues.

Centered on the figure of Victor Hugo with a rigorous and dazzling selection of his drawings – whose importance and inspiration for many contemporary artists become more and more significant – the exhibition presents in the same time the passions and the obsessions, less known by the public, of extraordinary figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau, Sergueï Mikhailovich Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, Jean Genet, Sacha Guitry, Franz Kafka, Pierre Klossowski, Carlo Levi, René Magritte, Nelson Mandela, Louise Michel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Arnold Schönberg, and contemporary artists: Etel Adnan, Chantal Akerman, Christian Boltanski, Chris Kraus, Pierre Guyotat, Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch, Patti Smith and Robert Wilson.

Materialized by his famous violin, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ presence in the exhibition is quite exceptional: an artist – Rome Price and director of Villa Medici from 1835 to 1841 – who never subordinated his musical passion to that for painting. The idiomatic expression “avoir un violon d’Ingres (to have a violin of Ingres)” takes its very origin in his person and was created, in reference to the less visible passions, sometimes real obsessions, which overlap with the “official” practices, intertwined with them, accompany them, ‘deviate’ them and densify artistic thought.