Chaumont-sur-Loire (Loire). Miquel Barceló has always loved materials, challenges, and excess. With eight tons, three meters high by four meters wide, and about four years of work, his latest sculpture installed at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire for the 17th edition of his Art Season has pushed the boundaries even further. If we add the development of a clay suitable for outdoors, the creation, in his workshop in Majorca (Spain), of a kiln designed for these extraordinary dimensions and firing in a single piece, transport by boat and then by exceptional convoy, we realize the technical prowess and the incredible challenge for what turns out to be a visual punch and a great success. Entitled The Chaumont Cavein a nod to the Chauvet cave and the artist’s lifelong passion for cave paintings, the work is the sixth permanent commission (after those of Jannis Kounellis, Gabriel Orozco, Sheila Hicks, etc.) placed by the Centre-Val de Loire Region for the Domaine. It evokes the immense open mouth of a monstrous animal (a fish?) with aggressive teeth and walls depicting, in a parietal style, jellyfish and other marine animals as well as a large goat, a horse, etc. and the portrait of the artist with an erection.
Plum Nourry, Atysinstallation at the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, 2024.
Installed in the historic park, this kind of “madness” is a perfect introduction to one of the themes chosen this year by Chantal Colleu-Dumond, director of the Domaine and curator of the Art Seasons. She wanted, in her own words, “transform Chaumont into Bomarzo Park” in reference to these 16th century gardens near Rome, also called the “Park of Monsters”. Thus, not far from Barceló, Prune Nourry installed a pair of bronze sculptures imitating rope, two “skeletons” half-man half-tree [voir ill.]. They recall the character of Atys in The Metamorphoses of Ovid, and are here in total harmony with their environment populated by large conifers. The principle of dialogue between the place and the artist, in other words of the adequacy between a work and its location, is found with The Birdcatcher And The Wild Man by Denis Monfleur. These two very beautiful ghostly sculptures in Chambois lava and basalt organ seem to emerge from a grove or hide there to better blend into its branches.
Bioulès, an artist to reconsider
The major exhibition, which as every year is presented in the upper galleries of the castle to (re)highlight an important artist not necessarily considered at his true value, is dedicated this summer to Vincent Bioulès. He occupies no less than nine rooms with around forty paintings, some of which are large format, mainly dated from the last twenty years. They take us on a journey through his various places of memory or present, the garden seen from his childhood bedroom in Montpellier, his grandparents’ mazet in Nîmes, the Pic Saint-Loup, the Etang de l’Or. Subtly hung, the whole recalls his great qualities as a colorist and the strength of his connection with the landscape and nature, in a very Matissian play on the windows offering views from the inside of a room to the outside or vice versa, from the outside to the inside.
It is still nature (the great theme of Chaumont-sur-Loire) that animates the splendid papers of Damien Cabanes, having long made flowers and plants one of his main themes. Invited this year in the category of recognized artists, he came to spend ten days in residence in September 2023, installed his large strips of paper on the lawns and painted portraits of the flowerbeds. In the end, he created seventeen works, some of which are 7 m long, presented in the five rooms of the Agnès-Varda courtyard, where we find his formidable ability to introduce a form of melancholy into the smallest bouquet and grove of flowers. In this same category, Gloria Friedmann (in the stables awning) as well as Anne and Patrick Poirier (in the donkey farm and on the footbath) fit perfectly into the exhibition.
Finally, among the fifteen artists gathered, Pascal Oudet, an engineer turned artist, is undeniably the winner of the revelation section with his development of a technique that allows him to cut oak trunks into very thin slices. Or how to transform wood into lace, like the Domaine.
