La ronde #4

Your contemporary art meeting
 

For the fourth consecutive year, La Ronde (“The Round”), a great contemporary art manifestation from the Normand territory, comes back. Just like in 2017 and 2018, based on a project call launched through France, the Metropolitan museums and their partners will exhibit the work of contemporary artists, renowned or emerging: sculpture, drawing, photography, installations, ceramic, performance… All forms of contemporary creation will be present and, during two months, the visitors will be able to discover, through different courses among the permanent collections, many exclusive artworks. This year, a new version of La Ronde’s revue will cover, apart from the projects presented for this exhibition, the entire actuality linked to contemporary art in the museums.

ARNAUD CAQUELARD, De mémoire

A ten-year odyssey led Arnaud Caquelard to his first exhibitions at La ronde 2019. Other than his perseverance in his graphic work evoking mazes, absurd architecture, we remember his constant research for occurred violence or violence to come: fallen rocks from an improbable sky, threatening guillotine, and nooses. Nonetheless, let us not occult the poesy in his work, the ancient photographs whom characters’ eyes are crossed in black, these fragmented maps evoking loss, these stitched and loaded dices clinging to a billiard mat falling to pieces, the hundreds “thank you”, Ex-Voto volatiles, messages without sender nor purpose ; they all insinuate we die without knowing it: the threat is still there… Par don(s) and De Mémoire, the two installations proposed by the Natural History Museum dissimulate under their undeniable delicacy, the cold revolution of death.

…de mémoire (…from memory)
 

It is an accumulation of prototypes, gleaned objects… stones never too precious… Unfinished or cursed artworks… self-grieving portraits… archives with no inventory… relation to the body… medical, chirurgical… the presentation of the territory…  

This living installation spreads within these showcase-tables like a shown-hidden portrait. Through this group of selected objects, I introduce myself without revealing too much. I introduce people I did not know. A game of mythography full of memories. A game between animating and inanimate. A game I still do not quite know the rules for sure…

Par don(s)

At the centre of this mineral collection, an origami set deploys itself, an aggregate of folded leaves marked with a graphic information, which, like its neighbour, only asks to get out of the framework. This installation is first a ghostly element for the viewer, then, by getting closer, the form appears and finally the pattern. The contrast, both by its idea and shape, confers the artwork its meaningful lightness.

Caquelard par don(s)

La Ronde is also:

• At the Fine-Art Museum, the photographic series All Star by Valérie Belin and a set of sculpture by Rina Banerjee, in partnership with the Natalie Obadia Gallery Paris/Bruxelles ; Les nuages by Victor Cord’Homme, a project carried by La Maison des Arts of Grand Quevilly
• At the Antiquity museum, an installation by Sophie Dubosc
• At the Secq des Tournelles museum, La troisième calamité by Simon Boudvin, who gets inspiration from the graphic of Hanoi’s wire racks, projects carried by the SHED
• At the Ceramic museum, L’arc-en-ciel géant Tagadaaaa… by Charlotte Coquen
• At the Fabrique des Savoirs : The photographic series of Stracci de Stefano
• At the National museum of Education (exhibition centre), carte blanche to the youth illustrator Arnaud Nebbache
• At the Hangar 107, the work of Tania Mouraud