How can works of art fit into an architectural complex and a landscape as symbolic as Versailles? As a good artist who cares about perspectives and systems of constructing representations, Xavier Veilhan has taken the liberty of staging a new painting in Louis XIV’s perfect setting, a fluid, dynamic trajectory focusing on relationships between scales, balances and observation points.

Informations

Contemporary art exhibition, from 13 september to 13 december 2009

Works displayed in the Castle (Plan your visit) :
The Mobile - Light Machine - Le Gisant (Youri Gagarine) - The Naked woman

Works displayed in the gardens and the Royal courtyard :
The Carriage - The Architects - The Moon - The Foutain

Be careful, the entry of the gardens is  every week-end of Foutains Play Music (Fountains Play Music end on 25 october, Plan your visit)

Whether using photography, sculpture, public statuary, video, installation or even the art of the exhibition, Xavier Veilhan structures his works around a backbone: the possibilities of representation.

One of his polymorphic approach’s most visible markers is the recourse to a treatment through the generic version of forms and objects, smoothed out, without detail or psychology. Veilhan’s figures are archetypes reduced to basics, prepared so that viewers can immediately project themselves in them and go beyond the stage of anecdote. Veilhan is fascinated by issues surrounding modernity and technological progress, as well as by mechanical systems and the construction of machines. From stereotype to prototype, the artist has muddied the waters by attacking standards. Mechanical modernity has crossed paths with Veilhan’s career, which started in the late 1980s and has continued to the most recent exhibitions. Veilhan offers huge environments the viewer can visit, always revealing the weight-bearing structure in order to completely strip away illusion: construction is what matters most in his art. Since the big installations of the late 1990s he has tried his hand at designing shows of his own works as well as those of other artists. The layout of exhibitions, from the garden of Versailles to the techniques of constructivist propaganda and the great universal exhibitions, is fertile analytical ground for the artist, who is interested in the orchestration of power and its iconographic materialisation.