Floating Worlds: Stéphane Belzère

from 05/02/2023 to 08/27/2023

In the mid-1990s, the painter Stéphane Belzère (born in 1963), decided to set up his easel in the room known as the “Pièces Molles” (soft parts) at the Museum of Natural History of Paris. This was the start of a pictorial adventure that has continued to this day, in which the artist inhabits his canvas with a recurrent, if not obsessive, motif: the jar.

The subject of numerous variations, the jar is accumulated, prodigiously enlarged and observed through the artist’s gaze, until it becomes an immense, indecipherable landscape.

Invited to take over one of the rooms that hold the permanent exhibition of the MAMCS, the painter engages in a dialogue with the collections of the Zoological Museum (currently closed for construction) by displaying some of his jars containing mammals, reptiles and amphibians. These “Floating Worlds” oscillate between several scales and types of presentation, so that they alternate between being highly realistic and deeply indecipherable. They are formed through a particular process that focuses on light, colour and transparency. The jars—ordinary containers filled with extraordinary contents—flit between figurative and abstract, attraction and repulsion and scientific objects and infinite sources of inspiration for the painter.

“Floating Worlds” is an exhibition of a new kind in the history of the MAMCS. A dialogue between two different types of collections, it offers a confrontation between a contemporary proposal and a scientific heritage, which complement and inform each other.

In partnership with the Zoological Museum.