Exposition "J'habite une ville fantôme", Thibaut Derien

Thibaut Derien began travelling around France twenty years ago, purposely avoiding the main roads and exits lined with miles of gaudy signs, insipid prefabs, uniform housing estates and dizzying traffic circles.

He set out in search of the few small shops still standing but well and truly abandoned, witnesses to an era, a trade, a taste, a fashion. These deserted little shops, left to the vagaries of time, he carefully selected from the multitude he found along the way, for the singular emotion they emanated, and which inspired him to create this ghost town, helplessly watching the bustle of impersonal shopping malls far, far away. Not so far away.

Once past the anguish of the end and the emptiness, we are nonetheless charmed by the beauty of the lines, words, materials, typography, openings, closures, shapes and colors of these stores.

And from these empty, orphaned shop windows suddenly emerge emotion and even a certain vitality. The vitality of the past, the vitality our imaginations can invent.

Thibaut Derien belongs to a family of photographers who turn documentary photography into an art form, the triviality of everyday life into a poem, and who observe with horror the mutations of our society, its contemporary ugliness and its past splendors. His ghost town reveals the ruins of a society that no longer exists, confronting us with our responsibilities and at the same time revealing the beauty that emerges from its rubble.

Art tour led by the artist on Friday, September 4 at 6pm.

Exhibition on view :

- wednesday 2 to Friday 4, 3pm to 6pm

- saturday 5 to Sunday 6, 10am to 1pm and 3pm to 6pm

- wednesday 9 to Friday 11, 3pm to 6pm

- saturday 12 to Sunday 13, 10am to 1pm and 3pm to 6pm