Bruno Monnier and his “lights” to conquer the world



IHe treated himself to a beautiful gasworks! To accommodate the Dutch version of his “Ateliers des Lumières”, Bruno Monnier invests, this April 22, a large industrial building, all in brick, in the west of Amsterdam. It is in this former factory, called Westergas, created in 1885 to produce the fuel supplying the heating and lighting network of the capital of the Netherlands, that the boss of Culturespaces has chosen to set up his last center of digital art offering visitors a dive into the paintings of great painters.

Called the “Factory of Lights” (in French and not in Dutch!), the place will broadcast four shows, seven days a week, offering an immersion in the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Friedensreich Hundertwasser, but also animated films by two young creative studios, one Turkish (Nohlab), the other French (SpectreLab). A “lucky charm” programming, they say internally, since it has brought together a million spectators, on average, in each of the places where it has been shown until then.

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Founded in 1990, the company Culturespaces begins a turning point in 2022. The company was not renewed in the management of the ancient theater of Orange nor in that of the arenas or the Maison Carrée in Nîmes. But it is accelerating its international development. Its Chairman and CEO, Bruno Monnier, is preparing to open two new locations: in Seoul in June and in New York in early September. Culturespaces plans to inaugurate three to four new “enlightenment” art centers per year in 2023 and 2024. The group is already eyeing Germany. But not only ! “The goal is to be present in five years in all the major political or economic capitals of Europe and in several locations in the United States”, continues Bruno Monnier. After Dortmund and Hamburg, next year, the entrepreneur says he plans to set up in Brussels, Berlin, Chicago and even Los Angeles.

Going international

This development beyond our borders, which began in 2018 with the creation of two branches under franchise, in Dubai and Jeju (South Korea), coincides with a change in shareholding. This company of 400 employees, which achieved, last financial year, a turnover of more than 45 million euros, saw, at the beginning of 2022, its majority shareholder, the Engie group, resell its shares (86% of the capital) to two investment funds, the IDI and Chevrillon groups. “It’s a new chapter that we are about to write,” explains the entrepreneur, who graduated in the late 1970s from the Paris Institute of Political Studies and then from HEC.

After starting out in a large communication agency, Bruno Monnier joined the cabinet of the Ministry of Culture between 1986 and 1988. He founded Culturespaces in 1990. The company first specialized in the management of heritage sites (the Jacquemart museum- André and the Villa Ephrussi on behalf of the Institut de France; the Hôtel de Caumont in Aix-en-Provence, the Château des Baux-de-Provence, but also the Palais des Papes in Avignon or the Maillol Museum in Paris …), on the model of the English National Trust.

It all starts in Les Baux-de-Provence

The cultural operator (then a subsidiary of the Havas group) began to produce its own exhibitions in the early 2000s. These shows were openly inspired by the immersive attractions of American leisure parks introducing escape games and role-playing games in historic places including he is in charge. Much to the chagrin of the world of culture.

In 2012, Bruno Monnier premiered a new kind of sound and light show in the Baux-de-Provence quarry. Using the limestone walls of this majestic site as a giant cinema screen, he projects an astonishing show concocted by the Italian digital artist Gianfranco Iannuzzi. There are staged paintings by Gauguin and Van Gogh on a soundtrack bringing together some classical music hits. This attraction renews the “Cathedral of images”, created in 1975 in the same place by the “pioneer” Albert Plécy.

Halfway between the slideshows of yesteryear and the virtual reality journeys of today, this show, renamed “Carrières de lumière”, is the subject of careful communication and attracts nearly 240,000 people from the start. first summer (700,000 tickets sold each year today). Here again, the world of museums is strangled by this way of showing paintings without an explanatory cartel or voice-over commentary. Worse… by cropping certain images and introducing animated sequences.

The recipe for success

“Our bias is that of emotion. Our films don’t explain the works, they don’t tell when or how they were made. They are content to immerse the spectators in it, ”recognizes Gianfranco Iannuzzi. Bruno Monnier assumes that he wants to reach the general public in this way other than through a didactic speech. “My goal is to bring in those who don’t come to the museum, that is to say more than 75% of the population. However, these people do not want to hear a boring speech, ”he sums up, boldly.

In 2018, he declined the formula in Paris by creating in a former foundry in the 11and district of the capital the little sister of these initial “Carrières des Lumières”. The public flocks in droves (1.5 million tickets sold the first year) to discover, in addition to the world of Klimt, that of Picasso, Dali or Gaudi. The Parisian “Atelier” is currently broadcasting a show in the form of a journey through the canvases of Paul Cézanne while waiting for a new show on Chagall in 2023.

Technological know-how

“The concept seems simple, but the technicality of the installations is not at all”, emits Gianfranco Iannuzzi, who produces for Culturespaces a program per year. “You first have to script a story without words, transform static images into animated sequences and do it in sufficient resolution so that the projected images do not lose quality”, says the company’s artistic director, d Venetian origin.

To do this, it is necessary to install more than 200 coordinated machines (laser overhead projectors and speakers). “Only our French team is able to do it”, insists Bruno Monnier, who declares that he has not, to date, found any external service provider capable of understanding the connections adapted to this task.

“Finally, the music that accompanies each show plays a fundamental role in the emotional journey that our productions provide”, adds Ana Debenedetti, former curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and who joined Culturespaces in 2020 to become its director. exhibitions. It’s Gianfranco Iannuzzi, again, who selects the playlist and, if necessary, replays certain tunes to “stick” to the atmosphere he intends to give to his film.

From Bordeaux to New York

In the spring of 2020, Bruno Monnier is opening its largest exhibition space in Bordeaux (nearly 13,000 square meters) in the heart of the city’s former submarine base. He then thought about setting up on the other side of the Atlantic so as not to allow a competitor which was beginning to emerge (LightHouse) to develop there. He first plans to land in Minneapolis. Associated with the IMG-Endeavor group, a giant of the American cultural sector, organizer of both blockbuster exhibitions (“Tutankhamun, the treasure of the pharaoh”…) and the Frieze festival, he finally decided to open a flagship in Manhattan. He says he is investing $22 million in the project.

The pandemic will postpone this project. Currently under construction, the “Hall of Lights” will open its doors on September 8 on Chambers Street. It will be a 3,000 square meter space, located in a listed building, across from New York City Hall. “The setting is, like all the sites where we are settling, steeped in history, since it was the headquarters of the Irish emigrants’ bank,” says Ana Debenedetti. “Which does not make our task any easier because we have to carry out a lot of development work”, slips Bruno Monnier. This eighth exhibition venue, for Culturespaces, will allow the group to schedule the Klimt exhibition again in the fall.

A profitable system

This new New York art center should enable the group to amortize more quickly its animations produced (14 to date) for an average of 500,000 euros. A tight budget in the cultural field. “It’s one of the advantages of digital to allow us to organize shows at a lower cost,” insists Bruno Monnier, who mentions the soaring budgets of major painting exhibitions, all over Europe.

“On average, today it takes more than a million to organize a classic exhibition,” he says. But the amounts are sometimes higher, such as for the exhibition of 200 paintings from the Morozov collection at the Louis Vuitton Foundation this winter,” he continues. It is rumored, in fact, that the note would have exceeded 12 million euros. An inflation which finds its origin in the fact that, even when they are loaned free of charge between museums, the works of art exhibited throughout the world need to be insured for astronomical amounts. Transport rates are also prohibitive. And it is not uncommon for the organizers of major retrospectives to have to pay expensive restoration costs.

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Is this the reason why, after having been criticized, Bruno Monnier is copied today? The Louvre has been planning, for two years in co-production with the Grand Palais, an immersive journey around the Mona Lisa. This film is shown at the Palais de la Bourse in Marseille (until August 21). “We can clearly see that, since the pandemic and, even more so, with the war in Ukraine, institutions are more and more reluctant to circulate their works. Our alternative is therefore the right one”, insists Bruno Monnier, who nevertheless recognizes that obstacles still exist in this activity.

READ ALSODive into the painting!

“Not all works lend themselves easily to such a transposition on the big screen. Those on a white background reverberate the light too much. However, the secret of our shows is to bathe our spectators in relative darkness. We cannot therefore deal with the drawing, except to modify the palette of the work”, slips Gianfranco Iannuzzi. A change that the rights holders of the artists do not always authorize. Especially since these animations also lead to reframing the paintings. Some object. The fund that manages Matisse’s moral rights has asked Culturespaces to stop operating a show where paintings by this painter appeared.

This does not prevent Bruno Monnier from maintaining confidence in his model. In June, his right-hand man, Gianfranco Iannuzzi, will test at the Kadokawa museum (Japan), open one hour from Tokyo in 2020, an adaptation of his show on Van Gogh: “In a smaller format”, he specifies. “The museum market is to be taken into account”, justifies Bruno Monnier, who entrusted his son with the task of compiling a catalog of digital works likely to be distributed in these institutions. “We have structured a subsidiary for this purpose, Culturespaces digital, which has to date acquired around ten programs for this purpose”, confirms Grégoire Monnier. Which dropped, two years ago, the universe of mergers and acquisitions to devote itself to the development of the family group.




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