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Praxiteles, Conoscere la forma

23rd March – 18th June 2007, Sully Wing, Saint Louis Hall, Louvre Museum

The project “Conoscere la forma”, the first event of which took place in May 2006 in Milan, will be staged at the Louvre between March and June 2007. The educational aspect of this project particularly interested Cyrille Gouyette, who is responsible for educational programme scheduling in the Parisian museum. He asked us to set up the display as part of an exhibition dedicated to Praxiteles, the Greek sculptor to whom the Dancing Satyr from Mazara del Vallo is attributed. This time, three leading French figures have been asked to give their own personal interpretations of the sculpture:

Alain Pasquier is the head of the Greek, Etruscan and Latin antiquities department. He began by studying the details: he used light to highlight several details on the sculpture, creating the photographic effect of looking first at the whole piece and then using the zoom to focus on a few details. He then built these details into a dynamic study, almost a gradual emotional discovery of the piece un front of him: “I believed that to open the mind, it was first necessary to touch the heart of the spectator and thereby bring a kind of emotional charge to the exploration of such an irrepressible piece, whose curved form integrates surprisingly well into the three dimensions of the space. [...] It seemed to me that, by making the light follow the leg and continue until it reaches the head, I would be accentuating this position of great movement within the space and would therefore have given the Satyr maximum expression.”

M. Jean-Luc Martinez, is a curator of the Greek, Etruscan and Latin antiquities department in the Louvre.
Martinez placed himself in front of the sculpture, trying to use light to flatten the piece to a two-dimensional shape in order to provide a response to two questions which arose during the scientific discussion concerning it: “Was this shape first created in two or three dimensions? I would like to display it somehow reduced to a simple outline”.
His study was therefore carried out in two stages: first he flattened the sculpture into a pure silhouette and then he tried to highlight its three-dimensional nature, using zenith light.

Agnès Robert is a partially-sighted opera singer. She used the sense of touch as her primary means of investigation, then dedicated herself to expanding her study of the piece using light - coloured light in particular – because she is able to detect colours very well. In fact, Ms Robert said that as the experiment progressed the sculpture seemed to increase in volume: “The extraordinary fact is that through touch I gained a mostly predominantly image, however with the illuminated perspectives and research into and using light, my perception of the size of the sculpture grew, paradoxically speaking.” She used colour to find a new vision of the sculpture, almost the opposite of a highlight scheme. This was the case in the extremely fortuitous vision of a bronze which is transparent, like glass after mixing in red and green, a vision which, among other things, was entirely accidental: “The bronze is not really transparent but the interaction of the lights and the contrast which is more or less accentuated between the sculpture and the base created this illusion of transparency. It is very interesting, even entertaining, to think that this discovery was made by chance. I believe chance is the doorway to invention/inventiveness”.