Gemine Muse

The exhibition at the Napoleonic Museum aims to affirm, through the metaphor of contemporary man in the museum world, how a game can be a symbol of a culture made up of disputes, encounters, exchanges and conflicting ideologies. Man is seen as contemporary art because the idea of a contemporary (whether artistic or human) automatically introduces and confirms the idea of a past; the museum is seen as the world, because it has always been a “collector” of mementoes from life (and especially from the past). Jeu de l'hombre (the game of man) is the Spanish card game (XVII-XVIII cent.) that Napoleon played during his confinement on Saint Helena.
Jeu de l’hombre comes to be seen as a game which softened the solitude of a man destined to die. A man who had himself been cancelled out, removed from society, but continued to speak through his influence on subsequent history. All of the exhibition turns around this germinal idea of man in the world, translated in the exhibition, through the artists in the museum, into the dominant idea of encounters between artistic reality and a variety of contexts.
It is interesting to understand how responses and relations manage, simply with the gaze, to enact presences and allusions, as the projects presented by the artists interact with the rooms of the Napoleonic Museum, creating a rapport with it that is sometimes explicit, as in Jessica Lapino’s video projections, and sometimes concealed, such as the installation by Ph.On e Arash Radpour. The minimalism of contemporary art is also made apparent and its ability to integrate itself anywhere without recourse to any invasion of the surrounding space. Jeu de l’hombre does not impose itself on the Napoleonic Museum, but reposes within it, causing the spectator to discover it, seeking, with the risk of not managing to find it. Contemporary art is brought into the museum without recourse to any too explict claims, just indeed as Napoleon died in isolation from the world, but nevertheless managing to change the history that followed.