Since 2020, Photo Days has each year given an artist carte blanche to create a new work for the Rotonde Balzac. For the 2025 edition, Paolo Ventura undertook research around Balzac the celebrated writer. With Promenades de nuit, the Italian artist imagines a series inspired by the author’s life in Paris. Presented in a setting that is both intimate and historical, his work brings fiction, memory, and architecture into dialogue in a delicately fantastical staging.
True to his method, Paolo Ventura begins by writing stories. His images poised between dream and reality re‑invent a melancholy, timeless Paris: a city of deserted alleyways and figures glimpsed beneath streetlamps. The scenes in Night Walks evoke a city suffused with solitude, nostalgia, and strangeness. They resonate with Balzac’s imaginary world, likewise inhabited by secret figures, complex lives, and chiaroscuro tales.
Exhibited within the walls of the Balzac Rotonda an officially listed jewel in the gardens of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild this series breathes new life into a preserved place, conceived as a homage to literature and opened by the Fondation des Artistes to contemporary creation. Here, the décor becomes a stage, and photography, a visual novel.
About the Balzac Rotonda-Fondation des Artistes
Since 2020, Photo Days has organized photographic exhibitions with the Fondation des Artistes inside the Balzac Rotonda a place steeped in history located in the gardens of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild. These exhibitions are exclusive commissions in which artists receive carte blanche to create new works designed specifically for this unique setting. Built by Baroness Adèle de Rothschild to honor the writer’s memory, the Rotonda has been preserved intact according to her last wishes. Adorned with chinoiserie‑style paneling and Japanese silk hangings embroidered in Kyoto in the 19th century, the Rotonda offers a richly intimate period décor. Fully restored in 2020, it is now open to the public, allowing photographic works to be discovered in an exceptional setting.
Fondation des Artistes — Rotonde Balzac (Paris 8th)
Paolo Ventura — Night Walks
Carte blanche on Honoré de Balzac
November 5–29
Rotonde Balzac · Fondation des Artistes
Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, 11 rue Berryer · Paris 8th
by appointment only, Tuesday–Saturday 10am–12pm and 2pm–6pm
