Traverser l’Histoire - Exposition de Jean-Pierre Formica

The shape of a boat emerges without its structure: it is no longer the framework that determines the outline, but its cargo, a constellation of earthenware sculptures from the "Mémoree" series, arranged like an archipelago of fragments. Presented in Jacques Réattu's former studio, overlooking the Rhône, the work seems to bathe in the river's ceaseless movement, a liquid memory that carries with it centuries of stories, histories and lives intertwined with the water.
In the chiaroscuro of the site, the Rhône murmurs beneath the windows, carrying dreams as it carries absent cargoes, and making scattered memories dance on its waves. The artist operates a displacement: the vehicle is no longer the symbol of a journey or a physical crossing, it becomes the receptacle of a sedimentation of memories, of ancient traces that the visitor discovers in a light that is both material and spiritual, to the rhythm of water and passage.
The installation invites visitors to let themselves be carried along by this cargo, drifting slowly on the great river of time, and taking with it, in the same movement, the surrounding works: unfinished canvases by Jacques Réattu and François-Xavier Fabre - a visual ode to the creator's gesture and to the poetry of the unfinished - as well as a monumental tapestry once belonging to the Knights of Malta, which revisits, in the 16th century, the theme of the Wonders of the Ancient World.