Petits riens

July 1st – November 19th, 2023

From July 2023, the Collection Lambert devotes the entire two floors of the Hôtel de Montfaucon to the Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou. A close friend of the Avignon institution for nearly 10 years, he participated in the major exhibition within the former Sainte-Anne prison, La disparition des lucioles (2014), where his crystal dolls and genies imbued the former prisoners’ cells with their poetic presence.

Now, at the Collection Lambert, he deploys an unprecedented project in which no less than ten new monumental works are produced, and four existing ones are redesigned for the spaces that will welcome them. In total, 23 installations will occupy the rooms of the museum.

Entitled Petits Riens, the exhibition is presented as a sensitive passage through the “chaos-world”, to use Edouard Glissant’s expression. Each installation becomes a pretext for an open conversation through which our deepest convictions are undone; through which situations are invented to give life to new ways of seeing the world.

With the support of GALLERIA CONTINUA

“Petits Riens are these minute things that, seeming to be nothing, pertain to the mountains around us. They are these tiny acts that, in the beginning, invisible to the naked eye, ram beams into our eyes.
Petits Riens is a sequence of experiences that I would like to put to the service of aesthetics, observations of banal scenes of my daily life put to the service of a new expedition, a set of plastic intentions bearing witness to my doubts, bases of my accumulated frustrations.
Petits Riens is my emergency call facing the multiple terrors which wrench my guts. But I will make sure this adventure transforms into a playful performance with joy and humor.
Color is the bullet in my weapon, and I will use it to extract us from the battlefield, very far away from the tanks and other poisoned arrows that have whistled in our meadows for almost three thousand years.
I would offer you screens, turned against the walls and sometimes against the floor, childhood memories for those who have already forgotten the drug of nursery rhymes. We will certainly dance and sing at the top of our lungs on the bridge of Avignon, We will also go looking for happiness on other continents beyond space.   
We will knead the muck to sculpt a new world map to share and, from electrical wires we will sculpt two circles of colours, linked by a fragile socket.
A water hose and its dry faucet will germinate at the center of a circle of dry dirt under a bloom of rippled metal sheets painted with rainbow colours, above our heads.
Branches coiffed with coloured plastic bags will trim a hedge of aerial honour.
Songs of birds from here and elsewhere will inhabit the décor and stretch the dream further.
We will dig the deep folds of our buried passions to extract the hidden truths, to restore to noble poetry its verses of convictions, the fundamental tool in the act of creating.”

Curator: Stephane Ibars