The retrospective devoted to Agnès Varda at the Villa Médicis unfolds a range of correspondences in which photography and cinema continually flirt with one another. Inherited from the patient work carried out by the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, under the direction of Anne de Mondenard and Paris Musées, the exhibition, already shown in Paris in 2025, finds a new resonance here, between memory and travel.
From the moment one enters, the exhibition emphasizes the formative years. Varda’s move to Rue Daguerre, to this courtyard studio transformed into a laboratory, studio, and exhibition space. More than a simple biographical setting, this space becomes a founding place. One sees a gaze taking shape there, already attentive to margins, ordinary gestures, and the anonymous silhouettes that populate a postwar Paris far removed from picturesque clichés. In counterpoint, excerpts from Cléo de 5 à 7 or Daguerréotypes reveal a continuity; the camera extends the photographer’s eye, slipping from one medium to another with an almost artisanal freedom.
Varda’s singularity lies in this constant oscillation between documentary and fiction, between commissioned work and intimate gesture. The archives of Ciné-Tamaris, now run by Rosalie Varda and Mathieu Demy, bear witness to this circulation of forms. Posters, original prints, and production photographs form a constellation in which each image seems to call forth its cinematic double.
In Rome, however, a shift takes place. The exhibition opens onto Varda’s Italy, less well known, more fragmentary. The photographs taken in Venice in 1959 are striking for their attention to recurring motifs hanging laundry, dark openings that already herald a poetics of the everyday. A self-portrait, posed humorously before a painting by Gentile Bellini, asserts her presence, that of an artist conscious of her own image, playing with her iconic hairstyle.
Varda’s Roman stay in 1963, for its part, places her within a cinematic environment in full effervescence. Sent to photograph Luchino Visconti, she joined Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Le Mépris, capturing Brigitte Bardot, Jack Palance and Michel Piccoli in a series of images in which reportage already becomes mise-en-scène. By inviting contemporary artists from Alexandre Calder to Martine Franck and Dominique Genty to engage in dialogue with this work, the Villa Médicis seeks less to update Varda than to reveal her search for a stylistic identity.
Thus, far from a simple retrospective, the exhibition composes a sensitive cartography: that of an oeuvre in which each image, still or moving, participates in the same gesture: inhabiting the world, capturing its hidden corners, and inscribing within it, with humor, a form of freedom.
Jean-Jacques Ader
“De-ci de-là, Paris-Rome,” exhibition of Agnès Varda at the Villa Medici in Rome, from February 25 to May 25, 2026. Paris curator: Anne de Mondenard, Musée Carnavalet; Italy: Carole Sandrin, Institute for Photography.
Villa Medici Roma
Viale della Trinità dei Monti, 1
00187 Roma RM, Italy
https://villamedici.it/
