In Valence, an exhibition offers a reinterpretation of French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot’s work by thirteen contemporary artists. Paintings, installations, silkscreen prints, photographs, graphic novels, and videos are inspired by major themes of the great filmmaker, like mystery, darkness, jealousy, fatal love, and madness.
For this exhibition, thirteen artists, coming from different backgrounds, took up the challenge: give a “sequel” to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s cinema in their own form of expression. They include François Boisrond, Miguel Chevalier, Orsten Groom, Ange Leccia, Alexandra Mas, and Agnès Pezeu. All continue to have a deep, close, intimate relationship with the creator of Inferno (an unfinished 1964 film experimenting with color transfiguring Romy Schneider that today remains a cult film).
For the artists, Clouzot was a source of inspiration, a master of thinking in terms of form and words, a generator of creation. According to a fine arts modulation rather than one of cinematography, the exhibition Henri-Georges Clouzot et les arts plastiques : une suite contemporaine [Henri-Georges Clouzot and the Fine Arts: A Contemporary Sequel] evokes the major themes dear to Henri-Georges Clouzot: fatal love, anxiety, morbid darkness, betrayal, jealousy, relativity, madness, paranoid compulsion, voyeurism, and mystery. They are omnipresent in the filmmaker and in his work, haunted by age-old questions. How has humanity come to pass? How is it constructed? Why is the other consistently a hindrance to living, loving, being oneself?
Though he holds a certain place in cinematic history, Clouzot equally holds a place in art history, particularly with Inferno (1964) and La Prisonnière (1968), two films in which fine art is convoked. Experimentally in Inferno, through Clouzot’s studies of form, fascinating to some, with the lighting of the human body. Historically in La Prisonnière, where the action takes place in the world of kinetic art.
Paul Ardenne
Paul Ardenne is a writer, an art historian, and an exhibition curator. He teaches contemporary art history at the university in Amiens.
Clouzot et les arts plastiques, une suite contemporaine
Du 4 mai au 5 juillet 2018
LuX – Scène nationale de Valence
36 Boulevard Général de Gaulle
26000 Valence
France
