Le Violon d’Ingres

Le Violon d’Ingres is an exhibition curated by Chiara Parisi that was developed through a dialogue between the curator and the artist Christian Boltanski, an exceptional exhibition on the transversal and radical practices of great personalities of all times.

Centered on the figure of Victor Hugo with a rigorous and dazzling selection of his drawings—whose importance and inspiration for many contemporary artists become more and more significant—the exhibition presents in the same time the passions and the obsessions, less known by the public, of extraordinary figures such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Jean Cocteau, Sergueï Mikhailovich Eisenstein, Federico Fellini, Jean Genet, Sacha Guitry, Franz Kafka, Pierre Klossowski, Carlo Levi, René Magritte, Nelson Mandela, Louise Michel, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Arnold Schönberg, and contemporary artists: Etel Adnan, Chantal Akerman, Christian Boltanski, Chris Kraus, Pierre Guyotat, Abbas Kiarostami, David Lynch, Patti Smith and Robert Wilson. 

Materialized by his famous violin, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ presence in the exhibition is quite exceptional: an artist—Rome Price and director of Villa Medici from 1835 to 1841—who never subordinated his musical passion to that for painting.

In creating audacious and unexpected dialogues, the exhibition intends to show how the idea of ​​artistic creation cannot be reduced or categorized with disciplinary grids, but finds its own life from the very tangle of different practices and disciplines which contribute to the creation of poetics, visions and changes, beyond the context—political, literary, philosophical, artistic, musical…

In harmony with the spirit of openness to all forms of expression that characterizes Villa Medici, Le Violon d’Ingres is conceived around artworks, from installation, painting, drawing to the tapestry, the sculpture and moving image… thus revealing a free path within the most intimate, obsessive and radical aspects of personalities who have marked forever our vision of the world.

A trilingual catalog (French, Italian, English), published by Electa-Mondadori, accompanies this exhibition and includes a beautiful iconographic ensemble of works as well as important texts by Chantal Akerman, Gérard Audinet, Boris Bergmann, Christian Boltanski, Italo Calvino, Ian Christie, Pierre Georgel, Donatien Grau, Stijn Huijts, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Pierre Klossowski, Chris Kraus, Nelson Mandela, Federico Nicolao, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Arnold Schönberg, Patti Smith, Jacqueline Sudaka-Bénazéraf, and the introduction by Muriel Mayette-Holtz and a conversation between Chiara Parisi and the psychiatrist Bernard Granger.

Press office, French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici | Italy
Anne Auchatraire, aauchatraire [​at​] image7.fr
Charlotte Mouraret, cmouraret [​at​] image7.fr

Communication, French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici | Italy
Cristiano Leone, cristiano.leone [​at​] villamedici.it
Arthur Godard-Saulgeot, arthur.godard [​at​] villamedici.it