Les Extatiques 2021

For the second time, Les Extatiques are installed at La Seine Musicale, where the Département des Hauts-de-Seine has invited six artists to create artworks on the roof garden of this cultural emblem of the Hauts-de-Seine.

Free exhibition in the public space and in the Bellini Garden: open every day from 11am until nightfall (July: 11am-10pm, August: 1am-9pm, September until 3 October: 11am-8pm)

The artists in the programme

1. ZADOK BEN-DAVID - Early Spring
2. LILIAN BOURGEAT - Pupitre [Desk]
3. JEAN-BERNARD MÉTAIS - "Chambres sensorielles" ["Sensory rooms"]
4. STÉPHANE THIDET - Pour tes beaux yeux [For your beautiful eyes]
5. NILS-UDO - FLEUR, Terre, osier, branches [FLOWER, Earth, wicker, branches]
6. NOËL DOLLA - Le chemin de l’île de soi [The Path to the Island of Self]

1. ZADOK BEN-DAVID - Early Spring, 2012

ZADOK BEN-DAVID

Born in 1949, in Bayhan, Yemen. Lives and works in London, UK.

Zadok Ben-David's poetic work is always inspired by the interaction between man and nature. It oscillates between miniature artwork and monumental installations. The artist creates delicate steel cut-out trees, plants and flowers inspired by Victorian engravings found in encyclopaedias on the language of flowers. These sculptures dialogue with the environment in which they are set and reflect the artist's concerns about the exploitation of nature by man. The work on cut metal has become the artist's preferred language, allowing him to create the contrasts and subtle visual illusions he seeks.

The artwork for La Seine Musicale

With Early Spring, the artist creates a human tree, where human forms replace the leaves and where the intertwined bodies express the union of Man and Nature. Like Nature, like every tree, Man also goes through all seasons. The tree of life is a universal symbol. "The first human tree I created in 2003 was a commission for Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. It honours and commemorates the resistance fighters of the Second World War, who hid in the forests and thus escaped the enemy by melting into the woods among the trees. This act of allowing oneself to be absorbed by nature, to lose oneself in it in order to survive, has always fascinated me. Zadok Ben-David

Early Spring
2012, Corten steel, hand-cut Plasma, unique piece, h. 450 cm
Courtesy of the artist

2. LILIAN BOURGEAT - Pupitre [Desk]

LILIAN BOURGEAT

Born in 1970 in Saint-Claude, France. Lives and works in Dijon, France.

Lilian Bourgeat's artwork, which appeared in the mid-1990s, is characterised by a constant taste for play and farce. The artist distils an often grating humour in the colourful and seductive universe of his oversized "hyper-realistic" objects. His sculptures are real traps, attracting us with their playfulness and then quickly playing with us and the confusion they impose on us. The scale of these objects always keeps them at the limit between possible functionality and excess. While they reveal an unprecedented formal quality during their transformation, it is the disarming situations resulting from their use, real or potential, that are at the heart of Lilian Bourgeat's work. Lilian Bourgeat has worked on numerous projects in public spaces in France, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Sweden and China. His artwork can also be found in numerous collections such as the Fonds national d'art contemporain, the FRAC Bourgogne, Pays de la Loire and Limousin, as well as in the collections of the Consortium (Dijon) and the CCC (Tours).

The artwork for La Seine Musicale

Les Pupitres (2012) is an oversized reproduction of musicians' desks. With their height of 6 metres, they retain their recognisable shape and material. The artwork, a nod to the very function of the La Seine Musicale building, plays with the viewer through its size. This change of scale deprives them of their original function and makes them fall into another universe, inviting birds to become improvised singers by attracting them with seeds placed on their edges.

Pupitre [Desk]
2012, stainless steel, 600 × 120 × 120 cm
Edition of 5 pieces
Courtesy Galerie Lange + Pult

3. JEAN-BERNARD MÉTAIS - "Chambres sensorielles" ["Sensory rooms]

JEAN-BERNARD MÉTAIS

Born in 1954 in Le Mans, France. Lives and works in Paris and the Sarthe, France.

"Jean-Bernard Métais has been developing projects in the public space since the early 1980s. [...] His creations, both visual and conceptual, are each time a specific response to the place and to a given situation. The artist's sculptural artistic approach is first and foremost a formal construction that starts from an interpretation of the context and responds to the physicality of the public space formed by its architectural framework and its urban functioning. "Herve-Armand Bechy

The artwork for La Seine Musicale

Arranged in a staggered pattern on the Place Rodin at La Seine Musicale in Boulogne-Billancourt, Jean-Bernard Métais' sensory chambers form a sculptural journey where each piece acts as a filter in the landscape. The artworks, monolithic in its dark exterior contours, transforms and lightens visually as one approaches it. Constructed in semi-transparent mesh, the moiré skin of these constructions produces an optical phenomenon that destabilises the gaze but also the physical and sensitive attitude of visitors. Depending on the angle of observation, the phenomenon of vibratory transparency is amplified. The stroll along the route takes the visitor into a sensory experience carried by the musicality of the different artworks which enter into resonance. Is it the object that moves or us? This quasi-hypnotic aspiration, these incessant visual displacements of the fixed frame, provide a poetic and sensory reversal of the place and the being: the passers-by, while circulating through these chambers, are as if sucked into a prism, a time catcher where the reality of things and the reading we make of them change and vacillate with each step.

"Chambres sensorielles" ["Sensory rooms"]
Set of 7 pieces constituting a 2021 journey, perforated metal and epoxy paint, variable dimensions, unique pieces
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie La Forest Divonne

4. STÉPHANE THIDET - Pour tes beaux yeux [For your beautiful eyes]

STÉPHANE THIDET

Born in 1974 in Paris, France. Lives and works in Paris, France.

Stéphane Thidet's artworks is based on several questions: the perception of time, the investment of space, the displacement of a real situation towards a fictitious environment... His artworks presents his vision of reality impregnated with fiction and poetry. "Each of Stéphane Thidet's artworks, beyond their formal beauty, is a crossroads that forces one to fantasize, to doubt, to be moved. The immediate seduction of a sparkling mirror is superimposed on the mechanics of the trap. Modern myths, his pieces capture the spectator in contradictory emotions, identical to those that man might experience when confronted with the wolf, his best enemy: fascination, bewitchment, threat. Gerogina Tacou

The artwork for La Seine Musicale

"For the exhibition Les Extatiques, I looked at the ecstasy of love, and more precisely at what precedes it, seduction. I am particularly interested in the interaction between an artwork and the viewer. An attempt to destabilise, to attract, which sometimes leads to fascination. An artwork seeks to seduce the person to whom it is addressed, according to codes, clues, detours, the trappings of a common culture. The artwork addresses itself, courts, escapes, reveals itself or gives itself away. The artwork Pour tes beaux yeux, perched above an architecture, plays with the viewer by reflecting the landscape in which the one to whom it is addressed is located. "Stéphane Thidet

Pour tes beaux yeux [For your beautiful eyes]
2021, steel, mirror surface, 200 × 390 cm
Courtesy of Galerie Aline Vidal

5. NILS-UDO - FLOWER, Earth, wicker, branches

NILS-UDO

Born in 1937 in Lauf, Germany. Lives and works in Upper Bavaria, Germany.

In 1972, NILS-UDO began his work and experiments in nature, making him a pioneer of Land Art in Europe. He has been exhibiting his paintings and photographs for 60 years all over the world, and in Paris at the Pierre-Alain Challier Gallery. NILS-UDO's work is that of a communion with nature. The respect for this nature, the absence of traces of human presence, reveals an enlightened view of the world, and the pressing need to take care of it. Sowing, planting, harvesting leaves and berries, weaving grass or wicker, combining colours and textures, each artwork is a sculpture of nature, the fruit of a meticulous elaboration to the rhythm of the seasons. The artist photographs his ephemeral installations, thus keeping track of each composition, whether plant or mineral. Faithful to her long-standing convictions, the artist also reveals through her paintings the colours of this same essential and universal nature, a perpetual source of inspiration for our eyes. Work in nature and work in his studio are two sides of the same coin.

The artwork for La Seine Musicale

On the roof of La Seine Musicale, a promontory of earth covered with a plantation of grass, NILS-UDO dreams of an immense Flower composed of earth and wicker and branches planted in the grass, forming the large petals of this sculptural installation. At its heart, the seeds are represented by smaller stems of wicker, planted on a bed of earth. Playing with vast proportions, the artist achieves a play of perspectives by combining the different heights of the stems and branches. From the tallest, on the outer edges of the flower, to the smallest in its centre.

FLEUR, Terre, osier, branches [FLOWER, Earth, wicker, branches]
2021, installation in situ, composed of earth, planted wicker stems and branches, variable dimensions, unique artwork
In situ realisation: Nils-Udo
Assistants: Renaud Hauray, Salim Mohammedi and Julien Jassaud
Suppliers: Sigma Bois, GIE Oseraies de France
Courtesy of Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier, Paris

6. NOËL DOLLA - Le Chemin de l’île de soi [The Path to the Island of Self]

NOËL DOLLA

Born in 1945 in Nice, France. Lives and works in Nice, France.

Noël Dolla began his work in the nature of "land art" even if he does not claim the term; as early as 1969; with his first of the Restructurations Spatiales. For more than fifty years, he has been questioning the essence of painting and more particularly abstract painting. He continually moves his work into fields of investigation that allow him to explore the practice of painting to its finest limits or margins. "Dolla likes to work on what he calls his "household side", he uses modest and familiar objects which are those of the daily life of the housewife, the house painter, or the angler. This vocabulary, established since the end of the 1960s, allows him to reinvest painting by exploring its actuality. Dolla is not a teacher, he works with uncertainty, he questions our way of looking, our point of view as spectators (literally and figuratively). He forces us to approach painting in a multiplicity of possible spaces (from the front of the wall to the scale of a room, from a landscape he invests in to the surface of an object); he encourages us to no longer consider the painter's activity under the sole aspect of image production, or a simple exercise in style on a flat surface...". Françoise-Claire Prodhon

The artwork for La Seine Musicale

For Les Extatiques, Noël Dolla has created an in situ installation, open to multiple viewpoints. Visible from the sky and on the giant screen of La Seine Musicale, the artwork can be walked on the ground, in the Bellini garden. Two mental images, producing a flow of reflections and new sensations, an introspective and initiatory journey on "The Path to the Island of the Self". This S.O.S. will be composed of gabions (cages) and a multitude of pieces of brightly coloured silk fabric that will vibrate in the wind like a flock of multicoloured birds. These fabrics will be hand-painted by the artist, in the continuity of her work exploring pictorial practice. "Launching an S.O.S. is a cry of hope, it means wanting to believe that everything is still possible. [...] more freedom, justice, equity, love, poetry and beauty for all living beings on this beautiful and unique planet, which is still blue for the moment. Noël Dolla

Le Chemin de l’île de soi [The Path to the Island of Self]
2021, gabions, handkerchiefs, dyes, dimensions variable
Courtesy Noël Dolla and Galerie Cesson-Beneytière