This exhibition will be dedicated to Agnès Varda who has always been very attached to the work of the Facteur Cheval and has enjoyed coming back to visit her Ideal Palace on numerous occasions since the 50s. Entitled Agnès Varda. Correspondences, the exhibition highlights the links that united Agnès Varda to this unique place through her taste for correspondence, her passion for postcards, her references to the emblematic figure of the postman-postman who will often cross his cinematographic work and documentary. This project is part of the new cultural program at the Palais Idéal, led by its director, Frédéric Legros, wishing to combine contemporary creation and artist tributes with the creative figure of Ferdinand Cheval.

10 days, 000 hours, 93 years of testing

April 1879. Ferdinand Cheval, a rural postman aged 43 at the time, stumbles on a stone so bizarre during his tour that it awakens a dream. True self-taught, he will devote 33 years of his life to building alone, a dream palace in his vegetable garden, inspired by nature, the postcards and the first illustrated magazines that he distributes. Traveling around thirty kilometers every day for his tours in the countryside, he will collect stones, helped by his faithful wheelbarrow. Alone, misunderstood, he inscribed on his monument "the work of one man". His dream palace was completed in 1912. In the heart of a lush garden, he imagines an uninhabitable palace, populated by an incredible bestiary - octopus, doe, caiman, elephant, pelican, bears, birds ... But also giants, fairies, mythological characters or even waterfalls, architectures from all continents. An architectural work as unclassifiable as it is universal. Unique in the world, the Ideal Palace has inspired artists for more than a century. Independent of any artistic movement, built without any architectural rule, the Ideal Palace has won the admiration of the surrealists, has been recognized as a work of brut art. It was classified in 1969 as a Historic Monument by André Malraux, then Minister of Culture, under the title of naive art.

Photographs of Agnes Varda

The exhibition route will bring together photographs of Agnès Varda and works related to some of his films like Les glaneurs et la glaneuse or Deux ans après, as well as many pieces from his personal collection: letters exchanged with artists such as Calder , Pierre François or Chris Marker, collections of old postcards, testimonies from viewers who liked his films. People known or unknown have fueled this postal pleasure throughout his life as shown by numerous documents, art-mails or modest art gifts, creative and playful witnesses matched in the exhibition.

Site of the Ideal Palace of the Postman Cheval in Hauterives in the Drôme: www.factercheval.com

To read our last article on the Ideal Palace:

Meet Jacques Gamblin, in the shoes of the horse factor!