Ceysson & Bénétière

The Belly of an Architect, a long backward tracking in our memory. Peter Greenaway of course. Rome’s majestic and geometrical architecture in the background, the still characters of the movie shot at camera level. An architecture that evokes the refined and symmetrical buildings of Etienne-Louis Boullée, a visionary and monumental, disciplined and megalomaniac 18th-century architect, who nonetheless suffered from terrible stomach aches. Grimaud is far away from Greenaway and Rome’s marbles (it would be Murder in a dry garden instead), and Jean Prouvé is a visionary architect of the non-egoistic kind if we look at the fragile and replaceable dimension of everything he produces, and his refusal to tap into the eternity illusion of stones. 

You will see. Some contemporary columns rival Rome’s, with colorful plans and geometries ruled by numbers. Drawing by numbers on graph paper, crumpled mirror metals, mixed words, and, like in Greenaway’s movie, landscapes seen through childhood’s windows, no-entry signs that prevent us from going back in time, crumbling steel and photographs of old stone palaces disappearing. A rebus maybe, a summer game, a unique composition in an American night, joy and end of a vibrant Locus Solus. 

Bernard Collet