Samuel Le Paire Fine Art is delighted to present Vémuse, an exhibition bringing together thirteen artists: Louise Bourgeois, Brassaï, Raoul Dufy, James Ensor, Alfred-Auguste Janniot, Wang Keping, Yves Klein, Jeff Koons, Jean Metzinger, Man Ray, Bettina Rheims et Mimmo Rotella. Samuel Le Paire Fine Art is offering a dialogue between Muse and Vénus from the term Vémuse which inhabits the works of these artists in a very diverse way.
Alternating between liminal and fatal, between light and dark, between deceptive and epiphanic, between Venus and Muse, Vémuse emerges with various appearances that artists have assigned her over time. Vémuse animates and feeds this secret fire which inhabits artists by allowing them to go beyond themselves, to seek, within the confines of creation, secret connections that form links in their intimacy with the object. Vémuse thus allows eroticism to be celebrated by the artist’s potential to reconfigure the relationship between beauty, truth and incarnation. This is the reason why Vémuse is shared between absolute destiny and the irreducibly sensitive manifestation of this same destiny.
The exhibition thus circumvents this formulation of Vémuse to raise the paradoxical relationship between Venus and Muse. ; the Muse is first of all time and the crystal of memory and fantasy. This mnemonic side of the Muse has a special life, a survival around Venus. The spiritual internalization of the Muse goes with the externalization of Venus. Hence the dilemma of the work which acts halfway between corporal sensuality and sacred emotion. Their challenge comes from an immemorial fixation of the simple discernible appearance; the Muses and Venus are the pure and obscure necessity to the artist.
Vémuse is a selection of works that have traversed the 20th and 21st centuries to retrace the survival of the most traditional of subjects: the female presence. In different artists’ processes, Vémuses are made to change shape, power, size, gaze, to adapt to the creativity of each artist. It is in such a context that the exhibited works should be placed.
