Melody from the sky, hallucinatory lighting and a tragicomic carousel on climate change? Welcome to Nantes at the end of the year holiday season. While Le Voyage à Nantes was rolling out its eleventh edition this summer, the team of Jean Blaise, creator and director of this contemporary art festival in the public space, concocted an equally inventive winter version: Le Voyage en winter. For this very first edition, the format is more reduced, with the complicity of three guest artists and a duration of five weeks (from November 24 to November 1er January 2023).
“Christmas being a religious holiday, and the artists willingly transgressive, we had some hesitation, but we finally decided to go ahead by working on the Christmas atmosphere, which plays on a very emotional register, since it appeals to childhood memories and collective memory », explains Jean Blaise. For this project, which hatched in a fairly short time – one year – the team chose to rely on artists who already knew the city, having already been invited there.
In 2020, Vincent Olinet had brought a touch of disturbing magic to the Voyage to Nantes, by drifting a princess four-poster bed on a canal in the city and by creating architectures of multicolored sandwiches, with soft luster, melting still lifes and papers literally painted flowers. We find his taste for the dilution of temporal markers, evanescence and fantastical visions in the part entrusted to him: revisiting Christmas lights. No light garlands here, but Japanese lantern-style sculptures with hallucinatory colorimetry.
Vincent Olinet offers a luminous double of the large deer sculpture in the Jardin des Plantes, which emerges here from behind a low wall in the heart of the city
The artist has opted for a set of architectural quotations by surveying the ornamentation of buildings in the city center districts, from medieval (the Bouffay district) to classic (around the Place Royale): brackets, moldings, mascarons or sculptures. And realized about thirty different shapes or patterns declined in some 675 modular elements borrowed from the urban environment to create vanishing lines and punctuations through the city. Some are placed in unusual places, with the same concern for bringing a renewed perspective to the city as with Le Voyage à Nantes.
Among these sculptures lit from the inside (by LEDs, energy sobriety requires), with a presence as ghostly as it is dreamlike, do not miss the façade covered with mascarons on the Place du Pilori, which brings together the figures found above. above the entrances to Nantes: howlers, Incas, grimaces, Hercules… Nor the addition of the ninth muse, that of astronomy, which was missing on the roof of the Graslin Theater, or the luminous double of the large sculpture of the deer in the Jardin des plants, which emerges here from behind a low wall in the heart of the city.
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