To coincide with the event “Le Voyage à Nantes” [The Journey to Nantes], an 8.5-km urban itinerary, the Palais de Tokyo is hosting one stage of “Sans cimaise et sans pantalon”, a carte blanche extended to the artist Alain Séchas who draws upon the collections of the Nantes Musée des Beaux-Arts in order to revisit them. Through his sculptures and installations where cats, Martians and centaurs take pride of place, as well as with his abstract paintings, Alain Séchas develops a universe underlining the complexity of the feelings that reside in human beings.

For this stopover in Paris, Alain Séchas proposes to present three works in the Galerie du Capricorne: the painting of the Naufrage du trois-mâts «L’Emily» en 1823 [Shipwreck of the three-master “Emily” in 1823], 1865, by Eugène Isabey; the marble sculpture Si je tombe [If I Fall], 1953-1954, by Émile Gilioli; and Gorille enlevant une femme [Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman] by the French sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet (1824-1910). By finding analogies between these works, Alain Séchas humorously shifts the self-evident erotic power of Frémiet’s Gorilla, which caused a scandal in its time. Alongside this group of works he puts Only Joe, a video montage of excerpts from the film Mighty Joe Young made in 1949 by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who had already created the famous King Kong of 1933 (our Gorilla is said to have inspired it). In the 1950s, the sexual beast has become a St Bernard,

and the mythological abduction a rescue. By interlinking the museum works of the 19th and 20th centuries with their still very current emotive power, from the great pictorial mechanism to the disaster film, from animal sculpture to abstraction, Alain Séchas speaks to us about violence and its tragicomic representations. 

Alain Séchas, born in 1955, lives and works in Paris.

More : www.museedesbeauxarts.nantes.fr