The Imaginary Museum of Jean de Loisy with the Palais de Tokyo

Having invited Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr and then Catherine Millet – an auctioneer and the founder of a cult magazine, who is also a writer – to reveal their ‘Imaginary Museum’, it seemed to us that we ought next to turn towards a public institution. We chose Jean de Loisy for two major reasons. The first was a friendly, generational complicity with one of the most active participants on the national and international art scene. The second was his recent appointment as president of the Palais de Tokyo.

Jean de Loisy ranks among the key figures of contemporary art, having played an active part in it for the last 30 years. He has led large organisations such as the Frac des Pays de la Loire, the Fondation Cartier, the Musée des Beaux-arts de Nîmes, etc., and organised prestigious exhibitions such as Gasiorowski and Traces du sacré at the Centre Pompidou, La Beauté in Avignon, Les Maîtres du désordre at the Quai Branly, etc. His passion for art and his involvement with artists are known and appreciated, and that is why we asked him to take up our invitation. 

He did so immediately, offering a rather different response from the first two ‘Imaginary Museum’. In particular, he suggested working with the Palais de Tokyo, in order to highlight a site, a dynamic and a team. This will obviously take the form of an exhibition, but not in the conventional sense. The aim is to take drawing out into the open, to display it not simply on gallery walls, but outdoors.  

 Philippe Piguet, Artistic director of DRAWING NOW PARIS

The strange conjunctures of chance…  Considered the mind’s most  form of expression, part of the prestige of drawing appears to stem from this intimacy with thought, of which it is simply a visible extension. The trace of a finger in soft clay, a charcoal outline on a rock, a carving in wood or bone, an Inuit knot in loosened string, the shadow outlined by Butades' daughter, doodles sketched during a speech, or graffiti sprayed on a subway train - drawing comes in many forms.

But the world also draws without us. Tangled branches, wrinkles on a face, wormholes in our old furniture… everything becomes a sign, and we are immediately drawn into the visions of Novalis: ‘figures which seem to belong to that great cipher which we discern written everywhere, in wings, eggshells, clouds and snow, in crystals and in stone formations, on ice covered waters, on the inside and outside of mountains, of plants, beasts and men, in the lights of heaven, on scored disks of pitch or glass or in iron filings round a magnet, and in strange conjunctures of chance.’ The environment has many ways of creating its design in the spectator’s distracted daydream. 

Invited to formulate its Imaginery Museum of drawing, the Palais de Tokyo aims to seize this opportunity to reveal the way in which the artists whose creations it supports and who are attentive to these chance circumstances take part in the world’s great game of drawing. With works by Davide Balula, Hicham Berrada, Marc Couturier, Sai Hua Kuan, Runo Lagomarsino, Rainier Lericolais, Patrick Neu, Karin Sander and others.   

Hicham Berrada, Un serpent dans le ciel, 2008 HD video of a performance with a balloon, 1m3 of helium, a brass pendulum mechanism, a homemade smoke bomb and a fuse Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Dominique Fiat, Paris

Marc Couturier, Redressement, tondo, 2009 Bonde, diamètre 11,3 cm Courtesy de l'artiste

Runo Lagomarsino, Crucero del Norte, 1976-2012. Exposed photographic paper, framed 17,8 x 24 cm each Collection Lena et Per Josefsson, Suède