Exhibition

Enivrez-vous (Get drunk)

5 Nov 2022 – 7 Jan 2023

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
11:00 – 19:00
Wednesday
11:00 – 19:00
Thursday
11:00 – 19:00
Friday
11:00 – 19:00
Saturday
11:00 – 19:00
Sunday
Closed

Free admission

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Praz-Delavallade - Paris

Paris
Paris, France

Address

Travel Information

  • M11 - Rambuteau
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About

Ever since antiquity, inebriation has been presented as a way of
opening the doors to creativity, a means that is deeply connected to
poetry, both by its origin, inspirational value and its subversive and
exhilarating aspects. After all, is it not fêted for giving rise to sharing
and festivity by worshipers of the Greek god Dionysus and his Roman
counterpart Bacchus, the god of wine who is the living embodiment
of this tribute to the values of drunkenness that paves the way to
other excesses, madness, theatricality and tragedy. Poets lay claim
to inebriation, asserting it as their way of accessing the inspirational
divine voice and describing the latter’s light, euphoric and ephemeral
condition.
In Petits poèmes en prose, which was published in 1869 two years after
his death, Baudelaire assembled men and wine to show the necessity
of drunkenness as an escape towards an ideal. Here he is speaking of
a poetic and spiritual inebriation that is an antidote to metaphysical
disarray and the passage of time. “Get Drunk”, he proclaims. “One must
always be drunk. That is the heart of the matter. So as not to feel
the horrible burden of Time crushing your shoulders and bending you
toward the earth, you must get drunk without rest. But on what? On
wine, on poetry, or on virtue; you choose. But get drunk.”
Baudelaire’s brilliance provides without a doubt relief from the burden
of life at a given moment in time and, to quote Véronique Nahoum
Grappe, “no matter what the future holds in store, drunkenness is an
investment in the present moment”. Charles Baudelaire is trying to
draw out the main idea, the implicit philosophy at the core of a work
and its creator’s vision of the world, the harmonious rapport between sensibility, perspective and an essential choice that defines a mind.
And this is precisely what characterises the get-together of artists in
which this exhibition invites you to participate, an encounter between
Baudelaire’s modernity and the creative pugnacity of 24 contemporary
artists in whom the forces of the imagination meet and intwine with
the poet’s ideal. What once excited him and now excites these artists
is not describing the material nature of art, but rather setting off in
search of its hidden source, by evoking the dreams and considerations
to which works of art give rise. Each artist present takes firmly hold
of their pictorial truth and the genesis of their art in order to analyse
their chosen means of expression and approach to colour, the flat
canvas surface, material questions and the mastery of space, light and
composition. “We have within us the sparks of knowledge, like a flint:
philosophers extract them through reason, but poets force them out
through the sharp blows of the imagination [...]”.1 Damn yourself through
your use of colour, eccentricity, madness and libertinism. Dare to drink
to excess for “[...] what does an eternity of damnation matter to one
who has found in a single instant an infinity of joy?”.

What to expect? Toggle

CuratorsToggle

Rene-Julien Praz

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Soufiane Ababri

Guy Yanai

Kelley Walker

Marnie Weber

Josh Smith

Jim Shaw

Pierre Seinturier

Ugo Rondinone

Golnaz Payani

Martin Margiela

Maude Maris

Thomas Liu Le Lann

Renaud Jerez

David Horváth

Julia Haumont

Miryam Haddad

Sepand Danesh

Jean Claracq

Anne Brégeaut

Nadjib Ben Ali

Pauline Bazignan

Raphaël Barontini

Carlotta Bailly-Borg

Pierre Ardouvin

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