“It comes to the man who rides for a long time through wild lands, the desire of a city. Finally, he arrived in Isidora, a city where the palaces have spiral staircases encrusted with sea shells, where spectacles and violins are made according to the rules of art, where when a stranger hesitates between two women he always meets a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls between gamblers. This is what he was thinking of when he had the desire for a city. Isidora is therefore the city of his dreams: with one difference. In his dream, the city included him as a young man. He reaches Isidora at an advanced age. There is on the square the small wall of the old people who look at passing the youth; he himself sits there, among the others. The desires are already memories.”
In the truculent Invisible Cities by Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985), the possibilities of cities are as countless as the tales. Fantasy or detailed, we will see the sister forms, drawn from reality, at the Sobering gallery with the works of three young artists, Etienne Gayard, Ana Popescu and Valentine Estève. Framed or zoomed, being the object of walks or graphic games, enlarged in details or on the contrary, reduced, tiny, in frozen scenes, and letting hover the shadow of a surveillance or evanescent reveries, the city is seen here by parts: tales as many questionings to its attractive power that to its multiple mirages.
Laurent Boudier
