From April 29th to November 5th, 2023, the Fondation Carmignac on Porquerolles presents L'île Intérieure exhibition at Villa Carmignac. As a mise en abyme of the insular location of the Fondation on Porquerolles, the exhibition explores an essential driver of creation, as powerful as it is common: the distancing of reality as to reveal an interiority.
In the beginning are landscapes and bodies, landscapes in bodies then, as dreams often like to produce, a tangle of situation, situations that are blurry, pleasant, and sometimes
disturbing. Faced with work acting as mirages, the gaze wanders.
While contemporary art has never been as political or engaged with the world as it is now, a whole section of creation, and particularly in painting, is seemingly breaking away from it in
order to offer vertiginous immersions into inner worlds and recesses. What is the significance of this current distancing from reality?
More than 80 works by fifty artists, from private and public collections, including the Carmignac collection, but also new productions, will draw the dotted outlines of an inner island, inviting each visitor to fill in the gaps in their own way.
From Peter Doig to Anna-Eva Bergman, from Ali Cherri to Auguste Rodin, the exhibition
proposes to confront visitors with these different worlds floating outside of known geographies and temporalities. The exhibition will feature archipelagos, as with Agnieszka Kurant’s installation sculpted by termites, under the water ceiling of the Villa Carmignac. Strange presences, human, animal, hybrid or supernatural, will populate the place, thanks to paintings by Andrew Cranston and Verne Dawson, as well as the sculptures by Francis Uprichard and Corentin Grossmann in the gardens. We will have to surrender ourselves : vertigo and tipping points await us in the either solar or crepuscular universes of Harold
Ancart, Marcella Barceló, Tursic & Mille and Christine Safa.
Although the exhibition gives rise to a fictional, mental and abstract island, we are frequently reminded of the real Mediterranean island thanks to works which were created on
Porquerolles more than a century ago (Jean-Francis Auburtin, Henri-Edmond Cross), a few years ago (Bernard Pesce, Bernard Plossu) or a few weeks before the opening (Darren Almond
and Jennifer Douzenel).
The island’s energy, its suspended temporality and its fragility, produces these dialogues with works whose poetry is contagious, inviting us to change scales and ask ourselves about the creative gesture and its current scope.
The Inner Island is an exhibition designed by Jean-Marie Gallais, art historian and curator. Since May 2022, he has been a curator at the Pinault Collection. He was formerly the head of programming at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where he curated the exhibitions Peindre la nuit (2018-2019), Lee Ufan. Habiter le temps (2019), Folklore (2020), and Ecrire, c’est dessiner (2021).
"The starting point was the island, and the question was: what exhibition can we host here, that we could not really host elsewhere? The freedom of the theme comes from insularity: as a space apart, an island enables the invention of other realities, other worlds, it opens up the imagination. This starting point also derives from the specificity of Porquerolles Island, which welcomes a large number of tourists every summer, to the extent that its natural equilibrium is under threat. The Villa Carmignac attracts some of them, and the challenge was to produce a very open contemporary art exhibition that could embark the visitor, who would not know
exactly what they would find, on an adventure in which they are the heroes, in a way. However, there is nothing heroic about it: it is a confrontation with the power of works of art, the power of evocation and imagination, of reflection, of emotion."
— Jean-Marie Gallais
THE ARTISTS
Caroline Achaintre
Etel Adnan
Darren Almond
Harold Ancart
Giulia Andreani
Lucas Arruda
Jean-Francis Auburtin
Marcella Barceló
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Anna-Eva Bergman
Ragna Bley
Tim Breuer
Alexander Calder
Ali Cherri
Francesco Clemente
Marcus Cope
Andrew Cranston
Henri-Edmond Cross
Verne Dawson
Jérémy Demester
Peter Doig
Jennifer Douzenel
Antoine Espinasseau
Helen Frankenthaler
Rodney Graham
Corentin Grossmann
Simon Hantaï
Camille Henrot
David Horvitz
Cathy Josefowitz
Pia Krajewski
Agnieszka Kurant
Roy Lichtenstein
Luz Moreno & Anaïs Silvestro
Jill Mulleady
Otobong Nkanga
Albert Oehlen
Bernard Pesce
Bernard Plossu
Sigmar Polke
Auguste Rodin
Christine Safa
Edgar Sarin
Norbert Schwontkowski
Kiki Smith
Léon Spilliaert
Tursic & Mille
Francis Upritchard
Frank Walter
Christopher Wool
With the permanent artworks:
Miquel Barceló, Huma Bhabha, Olaf Breuning, Jean Denant, Tom Friedman, Jeppe Hein, Wang Keping, Cornelia Konrads, Gonzalo Lebrija, Tony Matelli, Janaina Mello Landini, Bruce Nauman, Jaume Plensa, Michel Redolfi, Ugo Rondinone, Ed Ruscha, Tom Sachs, Nil Udo et Vhils.
