The director of the Mystère Picasso (1956), which remains to this day an unequaled example of capture, by the cinematographic oculus, of the plastic creation in the making. For the first time in the history of cinema, a painter (and what painter: nothing less than the immortal creator of Guernica) realizes under the eyes of the spectator several paintings, a creation of which we are free to discover all the complexity, and errors, as a privileged witness.

"Clouzot and the plastic arts: a contemporary suite": this exhibition of works emanating from plastic artists (designers and painters, videographers and installationists) could result from heresy, mixing two types of expression that the cultural history has more opposites than united: cinema, the art par excellence of storytelling and pulsating emotion; the plastic arts, apology, in their modern component, of the free form without obligatory connection with reality and offered if necessary to a slow meditation. Why, then, this exhibition?

Henri-Georges Clouzot was not only the art lover we know, the filmmaker of the Mystère Picasso then, with his second wife Inès Bise, a great art collector (the Clouzot collection, rich in major works of the twentieth century, will bequeathed to the death of Inès, in 2011, at Secours Catholique, before being dispersed at Christie's during a memorable sale). Again: his cinema, in depth, is worked through plastic effects, he gladly enriches the contribution, to the field of free form, of the artists of his time, Picasso already mentioned but also of other artists whose universe comes to irrigate its cinema images and their construction. Did Hitchcock, in The House of Doctor Edwards, entrust the design of a dream scene to Salvador Dali? Clouzot, in La Prisonnière, will make the kinetic painter Gilbert Moreau, embodied on screen by Bernard Fresson, a main character and, among the artists of geometric abstraction, the setting for this drama where creative ambitions do not blend well with love passion.

Thirteen visual artists, coming from different horizons, have accepted to take up this challenge: to give a "follow-up" to Henri-Georges Clouzot's cinema by means of their own register of expression. All have a close relationship with the creator of L'Enfer (1964; an unfinished film but whose colorist essays anticipating filming, transfiguring Romy Schneider) have remained close, intimate and always deep. Clouzot, for them, becomes inspiring, master of thought of form or purpose, generator of creation. Henri-Georges Clouzot and the visual arts: a contemporary suite offers the opportunity to evoke, according to a modulation other than cinematographic, that of the visual arts, the major themes dear to Henri-Georges Clouzot: fatal love, anguish , morbid darkness, betrayal, jealousy, relativity, madness, paranoid impulse, voyeurism, mystery finally, omnipresent in the filmmaker and in his film work, haunted by these immemorial questions: how do we get to 'humanity?, how do you build yourself?, why is the other invariably an impediment to living, loving, being yourself?

If he holds a certain place in the history of cinema, Clouzot also holds one in the history of art, especially from L'Enfer and La Prisonnière, two films where the plastic arts are summoned . On an experimental basis for Hell, through formal research by Clouzot, some of which are fascinating, in terms of lighting human bodies in particular. As a historicist in La Prisonnière, where the action takes place in the world of kinetic art and in that of lovers and collectors of contemporary art.

Paul Ardenne

Pratical information

CLOUZOT and plastic arts exhibition, A Contemporary Suite
From November 17, 2017 to January 12, 2018
Topography of Art
15, rue de Thorigny - 75003 Paris

To know more : www.topographiedelart.fr