To love Picasso like the beautiful Fernande
This is the first time that an exhibition has been entirely devoted to the woman who, nicknamed “the beautiful Fernande”, was long reduced to a supporting role in the mythology of nascent modern art. However, Fernande Olivier, whose real name is Amélie Lang, was the companion and model of the young Pablo Picasso until 1912, and the talented chronicler of life at the Bateau-Lavoir, this Montmartre refuge where, at the beginning of the 20the century, Matisse, Max Jacob, Apollinaire, Braque, Marie Laurencin, the Douanier Rousseau and so many others. In Picasso and his friends, published in 1933, Fernande recounts this bohemian life of which she was one of the privileged witnesses and evokes these artists in the making behind whom she chooses, basically, to fade away. Only in his posthumous collection Intimate memories, published in 1988, that the rich personality of Amélie/Fernande finally appears: she says in the first person her love for Pablo Picasso but also the harshness of her condition as a woman abused in her youth, then fallen into oblivion and near misery after having been the muse of one of the greatest painters of his time. And what a beautiful signal, really, to inaugurate the countless events of the centenary of Picasso’s death with this exhibition, a fascinating tribute to a woman in the shadows, herself an artist, who has finally come to light. The opportunity also to rediscover the charming museum of Montmartre, a former residence of artists overlooking the vineyards of the Butte, and where time, far from the waves of tourists, seems as if suspended. Run there!
“Fernande Olivier and Pablo Picasso, in the intimacy of the Bateau-Lavoir”, until February 19, 2023 at the Musée de Montmartre-Jardins Renoir.
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quiver at choir of lovers
A man and a woman speak at the same time, music as a couple, each telling their story in their own way, one says “I”, the other says “she”. She who, while they were both watching in bed, quietly, Al Pacino in Scarface, choking from an asthma attack. She will survive a hard fight, and we, spectators, accompany this couple, panting, in their car and to the emergency room, in front of the green curtain of the Bouffes du Nord. Tiago Rodrigues, new director of the Festival d’Avignon, is staging his first play, written and created in Lisbon in 2007. This choir of lovers questions the long-term path of the couple, of the relationship to time, when the loss of the other is more than conceivable: envisaged. Upon returning to everyday life, what life ensues? The interpretation, all in rhythms and complicity, by David Geselson and Alma Palacios marvelously serves this text of intense delicacy and great accuracy. And sometimes these words, these scenes, these lines are so funny, because no matter how hard we do, even after having come close to death, we quickly forget what we said to ourselves, that we have time, time… to less than coming age, perhaps? You have to find the time (it only lasts 45 minutes but so rich that you come out full of life) to go and see this refreshing piece and its palette of emotions which has… survived, oh how, over time!
choir of loversat the Bouffes du Nord until October 29th.
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Bow to this greatness of donkey
What can our world look like seen through the eyes of a donkey, the philosophical animal par excellence? “The donkey does not judge, it observes. At the age of 84, when the filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski was thought to have disappeared from the radar, he is back more sparkling than ever, with a UFO of dizzying audacity and freedom rewarded with the Jury Prize at the last Cannes Film Festival. The story is that of Eo, a little Sardinian donkey who lives happily in a circus with the gentle Kasandra until animal activists come to free him from his condition as a fairground beast. Then begins the odyssey of the donkey who, like Ulysses, crosses the world and its pitfalls when his only desire is to return home. Like a kid playing with the camera, the director films at the height of the withers, pulverizes the codes of production. He has fun with the image, sublimates it, transcends it. At the heart of this aesthetic frenzy – the photography is magnificent – the melancholic gaze of the donkey seems to contradict alone the anthropocentrism of the seventh art. A slap !
Eo, indoors.
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Join the Midnight Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcJH-zWaaGo
In The Haunting of Hill House et The Haunting of Bly Manor, Mike Flanagan explored the haunting of family and love in dwellings where ghosts were born from chosen and shared intimacy. In The Midnight Club, it drains the morbid vein at full power by staging companions in misfortune: the residents of Brightcliffe, an American hospice dedicated to palliative care for adolescents. In the 1990s, Ilonka, an 18-year-old orphan, suffered from terminal thyroid cancer. Interned in Brightcliffe, she joined the “Midnight Club”: young people at the end of their lives meet in the middle of the night to tell each other ghost stories. But Ilonka’s visions, which take their roots in the history of the old building and its former residents, mingle with the fictions of his friends and gradually reveal the chilling past of the place. True to his love for stories within history, skyrocketing angst, terrifying apparitions and jumps scares in series, Flanagan ties up a beautiful and good story of ghosts, terrifying and dense as we like them, marked with tinplate of melancholy.
On Netflix.
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Discover African artists at the Akaa fair
The admirable textile canvases of the great Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté welcome visitors to the central nave of the Akaa (Also Known as Africa) fair, the seventh edition of which is held at the Carreau du Temple, always, a place that suits him so well. What does this 2022 meeting have in store with talents from Africa and its diasporas, including Point is a partner? Nothing less than a meeting with 126 artists from 36 countries, represented by 38 galleries, from South Africa, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Morocco, but also from Paris – faithful Anne de Villepoix –, from Lisbon or London – the October Gallery presents Nnenna Okore, artist invited for a carte blanche as part of the Rencontres. We walk from stand to stand, we attend performances, we listen to artists and professionals discuss, on the proposal of Armelle Dakouo, artistic director of the fair, the theme chosen for this edition, movement in art. And that’s not all: the Présence africaine editions add literature and philosophy, with in particular Abd Al Malick, Souleymane Bachir Diagne and even the Goncourt 2021, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, for a moment of “Immobilities”, Sunday at 4 p.m. .
Akaa, at the Carreau du Temple, Paris 3efrom October 21 to 23.
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