Travel to Nantes, summer in Le Havre …

Nantes, Le Havre. Two twin demonstrations are held at the same time in France, “Le Voyage à Nantes” and “a summer to Le Havre”. Each takes place in a port city. The trip to Nantes was launched by Jean Blaise in 2012: the latter left his duties at the end of 2024, but designed the 2025 edition program whose new director general is Sophie Lévy. Jean Blaise was also the designer of a summer in Le Havre, created in 2017: Gaël Charbau took over the torch and signed his 3rd edition. The principle of the two events is a priori the same: to propose in the urban landscape an works journey, some of which join each year an open -air collection.

Placed under the sign of strangeness, this 2025 edition of the trip to Nantes invites its audience to walk between vision and illusion. Among the authors of flagship works, let us quote Iván Argote which makes the statue of Louis XVI disappear from the column erected in the center of the Marshal-Foch square: a symbolic, but little photogenic retract. Laurent Tixador plays the fantasy of return to nature on the tram facade in the form of a hut decor, the original being to be discovered on the lawns of the Park of Procedure … while the atmospheric installation of Jenna Kaës gives the central hall of the dispensary Jean-V, west of the city center, the appearance of a lynchian decor.

In a more realistic vein, Willem de Haan replaces the stone allegories of La Fontaine de la Place-Royale with portraits of Nantes and Nantes, when, Graslin place, plum nourry builds with hulls of overturned boats the stylized silhouette of a pregnant woman lying on her back-sort of minimalist remake of sculpture Shamelessness (1966), from Niki de Saint Phalle. The common thread may sometimes seem tenuous. It reserves some beautiful appearances, such as the subtle pictorial intervention of Flora Moscovici playing with the shade of the mosaics of the old PTT building whose blue seems to rub shoulders on the pavement of rue de l’Héronnière. The trip is also based on the programming of two local institutions: at the habit gallery, the solo of Gloria Friedmann (“How many land is it to man?”) Echoes the installation of the artist in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Briord, while the castle of the Dukes of Brittany presents 160 drawings and paintings from Hokusai.

In Le Havre, the seaside imagination

A summer in Le Havre opened a few days before the rally, from July 4 to 7, sailboats from the Tall Ships Race race, capable of draining a crowd of tourists; His journey between judiciously in resonance with this maritime story. The artist Nefeli Papadimouli is inspired by nautical trips by planting colored boat sails in the central courtyard of the Boaton residence. The Duo Elsa & Johanna draws from the seaside imagination by having the streets emblematic beach huts transformed into dioramas. Facing the sea, the beach shelter, built by two disciples by Auguste Perret, is wearing a floating roof inspired by seaflows and migratory flights and created by the ideal office duo. Didier Marcel has molded a limestone stone found later on the coast, near the cliffs of Étretat, to make it a fountain evoking the generous forms of the “nanas” of Niki de Saint Phalle – decidedly in the air of the times. In a more serious register-and while, more than eighty years after its destruction by the Allies, Le Havre celebrates the twentieth anniversary of its classification as a UNESCO World Heritage-, Louis-Cyprien Rials reconstitutes in his Hanging gardens Three doors of the city of Mosul bombed, erected as monuments: from one war the other. Screened during the season at the town hall theater, the film Tempsta by Mali Arun summons the ancient myth. Elsewhere, “Blue Oyster Cult …”, the monographic exhibition of Richard Fauguet programmed in parallel by the Center d’Art Le Portique, is a nod to the American rock group of the 1970s, and its title also refers to the artist’s oyster shells. We can only salute the playful coherence of the whole.