Notes

A few thoughts on the museum, quantities, materiality and crossover

Whose museum?

Every museum looks. The difference between the way a museum looks and the way the Cross looked when it was found is probably very great.

Why do I go to museums?

I'm not typical. I look for specific things. When I go to museums I don't perceive museum discourse. I notice it if it's bad. For example, the amphora rooms in the Louvre are a disaster; a kind of warehouse. I've entered the Louvre dozens of times to see a certain Byzantine icon or Bellini's "Christ Blessing", one of the most beautiful paintings done by the civilized West.

Is it not possible that man simply comes and confronts the object?

Is my experience so unrepeatable?

I have seen many museums. Like any Romanian, I was curious to see them for a while. All I knew was from books, I don't know which pharaoh, I don't know which painting... And then to see them! It's very exciting. So I didn't develop my visual culture in the museum, I developed it in the museum. What was important for me was when, having passed my love of craftsmanship, I stopped going to see Gothic. Then I started looking for Romanesque churches. But when I went to see a little Romanesque church in the Vendée, I already knew Romanian architecture, I knew Densuș. I began to look for that very "contained" object, in which the gesture is fully covered by the act of faith. As a painter today, you have no other school than nature and the museum. I too have learned from objects and nature.

In the museum I have a kind of crazy emotion which is not snobbism because, over time, it would have faded. I have a deep emotion about the idea of the museum. I like that there's a lot of things put together. I'm especially excited by the old, archaeological pieces. I think they were man-made 5,000 years ago. It moves me to tears.

It's no longer a question of how clever museum discourse is.

Of course, when I see a new museum, I'm like a schoolboy with a brain reading all the labels. I want to see a chronology: how geometric ceramics went from... In ethnographic museums I missed the beauty of the object. The mysterious connections of things, as mysterious as their production. In the ethnographic museum the beauty of the object is programmatically neglected, as if it were something shameful. I am terrified by the way it is displayed, the obsession with explanations, the excessive protection. They end up canceling out the object. You can't see it! And if beauty happens to shine through, it's because the object was too strong.

Why do objects say little to some people and a lot to me? It's not only a question of sensitivity and intellectual level. I think it's the number of connections that are made when an image is received that is the hardest. We have placed the "icon" of the peasant at the center of our museum and the word peasant in its title. I am dominated by a strong belief in the values of peasant art, in its validity and respect for these people who did not know how to defend themselves.The name of the museum, simple and direct, does not indicate a poverty of the field, nor a poetic departure from what we usually call folk art or ethnology, it shines a precise light on a new "object", the traditional man, described and analyzed through the objects that make up his world.