Poésie fait maison

Homemade Poetry poses a question: what if the visual arts came to the rescue of the poetic? Seeing the poetic everywhere, poetry is nowhere to be found. A sunset, a little orange, a little mauve? It's poetic. A languid piano? Poetic. Flower petals on the asphalt? Poetic. Poetic everywhere, poetry nowhere. The Homemade Poetry exhibition brings together six artists at La Gaya Scienza whose approach is profoundly poetic without initially evoking that feeling. Like poetry itself, they are unclassifiable, indefinable, blending approaches and media in their work, in a hybridization of techniques that reveals and transforms in a single gesture. Why poetry, and why the home? Because we are poets and because La Gaya Scienza is a home, it seemed natural to place the domestic question at the heart of this exhibition. Poetry is a dwelling in itself, a place we live in without moving in, a place we squat in or transform, constantly taking stock of the situation, a place where we move between inside and outside, a place we leave and return to, a place of which we are both inhabitants and visitors. Homemade poetry is a form of hospitality.

With Lionel Sabatté’s portraits of hair and household dust, Aurélie Mathigot’s everyday objects subjected to textile transformations and embroidery, Pierre Mabille’s infinite variation of forms and colors, Bernard Moninot’s scientific invention, Marie-Claire Mitout’s meticulous painting journal, and Frédérique Nalbandian’s transformations of matter, it becomes clear that these artists are inventing a poetic journey with a style akin to the visual arts, reconfiguring materials, forms, colors, memory, and time. Exploring the question of representation, and above all its means, they transform the sky into music, the wind into drawings, hair into faces, living flowers into plaster statues, everyday objects into fabric, and images into words. Each artist uses their own medium and materials: paint, natural and organic elements, sculpture, photography, plaster and soap, drawing, installation, and textiles.

The poetic is visible, poetry is invisible. "Homemade Poetry," by integrating the domestic dimension of La Gaya Scienza, its host, attempts to reveal what is unseen, to approach what is elusive, and to dream around this undefinable idea that is poetry. Each space offers a scenography, an installation dedicated to an artist and their world. The interplay between inside and outside, extending to the garden, is also explored. This journey from room to room is structured around 99 poems hung on a line along the corridors, like laundry drying. 99 possible variations of the house, by 99 poets from all eras and backgrounds. The poems become passageways and distribution points, markers that guide and radiate throughout the space. While the rooms are intimate spaces, the corridors are collective spaces that organize both the movement and the interaction of the people and works that inhabit the place.

Homemade Poetry doesn't provide an answer to the question it addresses; it formulates a hypothesis, it opens doors into the infinite house of the poem.

Curators: François Heusbourg and Pierre Mabille

Artists: Pierre Mabille, Aurélie Mathigot, Marie-Claire Mitout, Bernard Moninot, Frédérique Nalbandian, Lionel Sabatté & the texts of 99 poets.