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From May to December 2008, the Musée Réattu (Arles, South of France) - musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville d’Arles - invites one of his most famous dreamers, Christian Lacroix, to invest 2.000 m2 of this famous Renaissance palace, former Grand Priory of the Order of Malta, which he had made, as teenager, his weekly goal of his truancy and the first laboratory of his artistic dreams.
Homage to a magnetic place, one-on-one with the curve of the Rhone, whose landscape and collections have continued for two centuries to dialogue with an extraordinary group of artists - including Zadkine, Picasso, Clergue, Alechinsky - the unique device developed by Christian Lacroix on a theme around the body, the fold, the hair, and the way of "raid-excursion" reinterprets the building and its surroundings in an extravagant reverie. Lacroix draws freely in the ancient and contemporary collections of the museum, revisits his own creations, invites contemporary artists such as Johan Creten, Daniel Firman, Katerina Jebb, Emmanuel Lagarrigue, Jean-Michel Othoniel or Bernard Quesniaux, as accomplices such as Chantal Goirand, Gael Mamin and Olivier Saillard.
The intervention of Christian Lacroix takes into account the totality of the exhibition halls and courtyards of the museum and is deployed outside of the building, including the facade on the river and the Grand Priory Street. He is both author and designer, with new insights and an "hand-sewn" scenery designed for each space.
The viewer is invited to cross the space in thoughts, to let go of his imagination and, as Alice, to lose the proportions of the real, notably with the giant necklace (Peggy’s necklace) Othoniel hung near Guillaume Janot’s pink flowers. Both artworks welcome the visitors and set the tone of all these playful, light and colorful interventions, paradoxical perhaps, but still true to their host spirit.
"A small necklace made of Murano beads distributed to a gaypride, the metro station at the Palais Royal (Paris), the small theater of Pierre Loti, watercolors, great emblematic necklaces. We needed one in this very court to tell the presence of art / crafts that I see too, the accessory that is not incidental, futility that is so serious, the childhood not so candid but cruel".
Christian Lacroix