For its second exhibition since reopening at the end of 2025, the Galerie du Château d’Eau has entrusted the walls of its Tower to a cross-invitation: that of the Fundació Foto Colectania and its former director Pepe Font de Mora. At the initiative of Magali Blénet, the venue’s director, the institution thus brings into dialogue the works of two major figures of Iberian photography, the Spaniard Chema Madoz and Helena Almeida, a Portuguese visual artist, whose works fully inhabit space.
Implemented by the Fundació Foto Colectania, its programs, exhibitions, activities, and publications are organized around a project that is both innovative and participatory, centered on reflection about the image and its foundations. The institution explores its possibilities, its capacities for communication, but also its ability to foster a critical gaze. Rooted in Barcelona, Foto Colectania develops a demanding cultural program there while also situating its work within an international dynamic through the production and circulation of artists’ projects on a global scale. It also houses a library specialized in photography as well as a collection of more than 3,000 works, bringing together some 80 Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese artists.
The exhibition “Diseños habitados” (“Inhabited Drawings”) is built from the sensitive correspondences between the works of two of the first artists to enter the Barcelona collection, whom Le Château d’Eau honors here. Pepe Font de Mora also invokes the Renaissance conception of drawing, understood both as line and as intention, where the idea takes shape as form. This notion aptly illuminates the practice of both artists.
For Almeida as for Madoz, the use of sketching seems linked to the same attraction to the intimate and the experimental. Both produced a multitude of sketches — some of which remained at the project stage — the first materializations of their intuitions on paper. In this exhibition, Font de Mora chooses to emphasize the value of these drawings, considered as works in themselves, simple and elegant, of which the photograph is the culmination. The exhibition path thus unfolds at the point of meeting between Almeida’s and Madoz’s worlds; two distinct visual languages, yet united by the same choice of photography as a medium, in the service of a dense, subtle, and deeply singular imagination.
In Gallery 2, echoing the nearby Été photographique de Lectoure, Anne Desplantez, accompanied by Les enfants du Sarthé, children placed in the care of social services at the Sarthé center (Gers), reveals the series “Parce que. Ici”. A sensitive proposal that brings forth the youthful visions of these girls and boys, their imaginaries and their realities, in an approach that is at once artistic and spontaneous. In this singular place where childhood learns to reinvent itself, their images experiment with portraits and body language as much as with fragments of everyday life.
Jean-Jacques Ader
Exhibition “Diseños habitados” by Chema Madoz & Helena Almeida at Le Château d’Eau (the Tower) in Toulouse from April 15 to August 23, 2026.
“Parce que. Ici” Anne Desplantez & Les enfants du Sarthé from March 25 to May 24, 2026.
Information: https://chateaudeau.toulouse.fr/
