BE CAREFUL : SHOW WAS STOPPED ON MARCH 9 EVENING FOR UNEXPLAINED REASONS, INDEPENDENT FROM THE ARTIST FREE WILL.
Solo show. A proposition of Carole de Bona for Vendôme Luxury Art.
In collaboration with Flaviano Scaratti, Head Sommelier of Le Meurice
and Cédric Grolet, Pastry Chef of Le Meurice
Curators: Carole de Bona and Laurent le Bourhis for Vendôme Luxury Art.
Technical and artistic assistance: Xavier Gautier
Scenography: Nicolas Favet, architect
Construction: Ioan Dragos, BBCerdac
Art design: Christophe le Drean
Special thanks to Franka Holtmann, Ibrahim Touré and Nicolas Grau (Le Meurice).
WHEN LEONARDO PAINTS GRACE KELLY THE FLOW OF APPEARANCES WHIRLS FOR LAURENT FIEVET
by Paul- Emmanuel Odin
Behind Hitchcocks Rear Window, Laurent Fiévet sees Leonardo da Vinci. He has proved it in a thesis soon to be published as a book. He shows it here directly, unvarnished and without artifice, with a proposition that is both literal and stark. The video installation States of Grace by Lawrence Fiévet sends an exquisite and extreme slow motion thrill over some shots from Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock, and reveals how this film is possessed by the aesthetics of Leonardo da Vinci through overprints. Thus we see Grace Kelly through da Vinci. In this infinitely intriguing interplay between film and painting in which each becomes lost in the other, the divine grace of da Vincis Madonnas and the grace of film star Grace Kelly merge and blend. Neither cinema nor painting come out unscathed.
How might the movement of film images coexist with the stillness of a painting? How does this impossibility represent all the challenge and the lure of this proposal, its radicalism, and the evidence of its assertions involving the identity of film and painting? Leonardo da Vincis painting was precisely, at heart, painting about movement, because da Vinci the painter and scientist was primarily interested in the flow of appearances, seeking to represent movements of the soul through movements of the body and thus reveal the blending of shadow and movement through the famous “Leonardo sfumato.”
Beyond painting and film, something else emerges on the surface of the images, duplications, decenterings, twists, distortions and disfigurements. The encounter between the da Vinci paintings and the faces of Grace Kelly and James Stewart means that the figures are perverted, they are twisted to become not pure sensation, like Francis Bacon, but liquidity and monstrosity of emotion, of the soul.
Next to each video screen, Laurent Fiévet displays a bottle of wine. What is suddenly on the viewers side, other than this still, dark liquid (which is the one the characters drink in the film)? Time is thus inhabited by the black blood wine that no longer flows like time but is enclosed here in representation and drunkenness, in vertigo.
Le Meurice
Entrance from March 6 to March 9
6, rue de Castiglione
75001 Paris
Entrance from March 10 to April 6
228, rue de Rivoli
75001 Paris
24/24. Free admission.
www.vendomeluxury-paris.com
