Les Modules / Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent — Le Rayon vert — Palais de Tokyo — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 10 → July 3, 2011

1882: Jules Verne writes Le Rayon vert [The Green Ray], a novel inspired by an eponymous optical phenomenon.

1947: As part of the Exposition internationale du surréalisme [International Surrealism Exhibition] at the Galerie Maeght, Frederick J. Kiesler presents a series of installations, the first entitled “Salle des superstitions” [Superstitions’ room], the second “Totem des religions” [Religions’ Totem] and the last “Le Rayon vert”, an assembly he designs as the place where the arts converge to develop a magical architecture in opposition to the architecture of Le Corbusier.

1986: To make a film entitled Le Rayon vert [The Green Ray], Eric Rohmer draws inspiration from some lines written by Arthur Rimbaud: « Ah ! que le temps vienne / Où les cœurs s’éprennent » [“Ah! Let the time come / When hearts are enamoured”].

Since 1989: Some people have claimed that the Virgin Mary appears in the sky at California City, in the heart of the Mojave Desert at a given time on the 13th of every month. So hundreds of pilgrims flock there regularly, scanning the clouds, hoping to see a celestial vision.

The exhibition bearing this title forms confluences as strange as optics and love, the instant and superstitions. Each of the works shown on this occasion develops a special relationship with time, its variations and experiments involving it. In an oscillation of every possibility, the residents at Le Pavillon are presenting a project where performance, concert, variations, dilations, hypotheses and potentials are intermingled.