The summer stroll in Chaumont-sur-Loire

About the 17th Art Season at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.

I am delighted ! Keeping a delicious memory of my beautiful escape to the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire in June 2022, while I was traveling from Vendée to Lorraine, it only seems fair to me to discover in Artpress this month that Catherine Francblin also is making the trip this year. And so this eminent art critic reports on it in the June issue of the contemporary art magazine. Note that the latest work published by Gallimard by Catherine Francblin is entitled “Bernar Venet. A lifetime for art.” Thick work that I have not yet managed to finish as it is so dense, but which I recommend to you as it finely illuminates the different turning points in the art and life of this man particularly known for his gigantic steel sculptures standing in the public space, in particular thanks to the countless letters that the artist addressed to his mother and to which the author had access, in which he describes the developments of his career, his meetings with major figures, from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol by way of Christo. Driven by the sole ambition of surpassing himself, Bernar Venet, born in 1941, never ceases to reinvent himself.

At the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, the artist represented by the Perrotin and Ceysson & Bénétière art galleries offers several sculptures emblematic of his mathematical obsession. “My work is always derived from concepts that appear antagonistic, but which I prefer to describe as complementary. It’s my way of thinking, my method for discovering different solutions applicable to the history of sculpture,” wrote Bernar Venet for “The Hypothesis of Gravity,” his exhibition at the Louvre Lens from July 11, 2021 to January 10. 2022. Today freed from the “constructivist traditions of intuitive composition, as well as the serial, pre-established arrangements of artists of concrete and minimal Art”, now conventional, his sculptures suggest “randomness as the rule of the game”, can -we read in his presentation at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire.

But what is the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire? For Catherine Francblin, for example, it was a “blessed interlude” to escape the concrete of Paris for a weekend, 200 km south of the capital. I will leave it to him to present it to you very prosaically, just to spare you some of my lyrical flights of fancy: “The site, owned by the Centre-Val de Loire Region since 2008, extends over 32 hectares of parks which spread in front of one of the three most beautiful castles in the Loire Valley, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. A center of arts and nature, the place is both a walking space and an open-air museum, both a laboratory of experiments and a center of inventions regularly renewed during the three main events which take place. take place there every year: the contemporary art season from April to October, the international garden festival on practically the same dates and, during the winter, the major exhibition dedicated to photography entitled Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire. To these events have recently been added monthly meetings bringing together philosophers and scientists on the theme of art and nature. »

There you go, you know everything. Or almost. Because you really have to experience it to feel it, this Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire. Besides, I had parked my trailer not far away to continue my journey in the evening, but if you have the means, frankly don't hesitate to stay there two days: you can in fact spend the night there at the Domaine hotel located in an old restored farmhouse, as Catherine Francblin tells you, who had surely been invited there, given the particularly laudatory chapter that she devotes in her article to the director of the place. Judge for yourself. “The responsibility for such a structure could only fall to a person capable of ensuring the protection and development of the different sectors of the establishment, starting with the castle (built between the 15th and 19th centuries ) and the park, than to develop a set of activities linked to nature and centered on today's creation, including gardening and landscape creation. No one other than Chantal Colleu-Dumond, director of the place, could carry out this mission with so much energy and imagination. » And to quote the director herself, granddaughter of a horticulturist, passionate about heritage and nevertheless familiar with the multiple orientations of living art and ecological issues, former cultural advisor in Rome: “I see Chaumont as a painting . I feel like a composer and a conductor. » From there to evoking the monsters of the famous Bomarzo Gardens for Catherine Francblin in front of the Grotte de Chaumont, a monumental ceramic work created this year by Miquel Barcelo, there was obviously only one step that the former Roman did not take. did not hesitate to cross. If these two weren't already friends before, I bet they are!

Around fifteen French and foreign contemporary artists were therefore invited by the gifted director to produce works of art on the occasion of this 17th edition of the contemporary art season of the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, which It opens on March 30 and will end on October 27. Which are therefore added to the fifty others which constitute the permanent collection of the art center, such as the interventions of Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger in the chapel and of El Anatsui in the Hayloft Gallery, or the cairn of Andy Goldsworthy, the hand grabbing a trunk by Giuseppe Penone, the treehouse by Tadashi Kawamata, the cylinders to see through by Vincent Barré... Enough to have a fairly complete panorama of what is ultimately currently happening on the market art.

This year Chantal Colleu-Dumond invited Vincent Bioulès to occupy the ten rooms in the upper galleries of the castle. As Catherine Francblin explains, “becoming figurative after his break with the Support-Surface group, Bioulès is now a landscape painter who draws on everything he has seen and learned. Very attached to his native region, he paints the trunks of the plane trees of the South, capturing the light of a Languedoc garden. In front of his paintings, the visitor recharges his batteries in the intense colors of Bonnard and Nabis, but also explores reliefs of arid and dark rocks on the verge of abstraction. » Visitors will also encounter the immense paintings on paper that Damien Cabanes created on site, facing the flower beds of the Domaine, the gilded bronze architecture of Anne and Patrick Poirier inspired by the Mayan site of Tikal and moored here in the footbath for horses, the curious Tenant by Gloria Friedmann under the Awning of the stables, in the person of this man in very bad shape, perched on a terrestrial globe itself balanced on the back of a turtle... Honestly, take time to slow down this summer if you visit the Loire castles.

Article written by Valibri in Roulotte