Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

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Les Prairies's artists
FLORIAN FOUCHé
L’école du village, Musée du paysan roumain, Bucarest, 2010-2012. Courtesy of the artist.
In 2007, Florian Fouché went to Târgu Jiu in Romania to study the war memorial
erected there by Brancusi in 1938. The ensemble comprises three sculptures: the Table
of Silence, the Gate of the Kiss and the Column of the Infinite. It is a condensation
of formal vocabulary that links the pared down simplicity of his plan to archaism.
Fouché evidently found the same balance at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant
in Bucharest, which was refurbished in 1990 under the direction of the painter Horia
Bernea, whose anthropologist father was a specialist in peasant culture. On the theory
that sympathetic organisation of the objects could act as explanation in itself, Bernea
and his team transformed obsessive didacticism into a gently pedagogic approach
that they hoped would give rise to a "poetics of museography". Out of context, the
vernacular objects are rendered exotic by the occasionally somewhat Modernist
devices used to exhibit them – pedestals, cabinets, mannequins, hanging rails. In 2010
Florian Fouché took photographs of some of these arrangements. Twenty-eight of the
one hundred and twenty images are presented here between glass plates, on shelves.
With its sensitive treatment of fragmentary views, exploiting depth and transparency,
the arrangement is partly inspired by the display cabinets designed by Bernea. For
the Ateliers de Rennes Florian Fouché continued his research, in the summer of 2012,
with the team at the museum. He is writing about this extraordinary ensemble whose
experiments in scenography tally in some respects with the intuitive syncretism of his
own approach.
H. M. tr. J.H.
Born in 1983 in Lyon, lives and works in Paris (France).
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.