Musée national Fernand Léger 2023

As a follow-up to the « Fernand Léger et le cinéma » exhibition presented in 2022, the Fernand Léger national Museum is continuing its exploration of the fertile relationship between painting and moving images by inviting a major figure in French contemporary creation, Pierrick Sorin.

For the museum, the artist has created an original and spectacular work entitled « Le Balai mécanique ».

Almost a century after « Ballet mécanique », an experimental film co-directed in 1924 by Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and theAmerican filmmaker Dudley Murphy, Pierrick Sorin pays tribute to Léger’s modernity and aesthetic inventiveness. For the Fernand Léger National Museum, he has created a new and spectacular work, « Le Balai mécanique », which hijacks this masterpiece of the history of cinema with a facetious, slightly impertinent humour. His monumental installation combines machinery, holograms and image projections, the content of which is directly derived from objects set in motion by mechanisms present in the exhibition space.

Born in Nantes in 1960, Pierrick Sorin is a video artist, director and set designer. In videos inspired by silent films and the poetic worlds of Georges Méliès and Jacques Tati, he plays a character who questions the meaning of our lives with irony. Since 1995, he has been creating « optical theatres » in particular. This process, which dates back to the 19th century, allows him to create miniature stagings in which he appears as a hologram in real settings. Always a little ambiguous, the characters he plays are funny, but unsuited to the world, adept at a rather clever clumsiness, a little silly, but always full of malice.

Since 2006, the artist has also been directing operas based on an original and lively use of video. In these scenographies, the image is often immersive and accompanied by three-dimensional effets. As for the process of visual creation itself, it is offerted to the viewer in all its poetic dimension. Whether in his short videos, in his optical works or in his large-scale stagings, humour, inventiveness and derision – or self-mockery – are always present and go hand in hand with an underlying philosophical questioning: « My work has an intellectual dimension. It willingly questions the meaning of artistic activity. It is, however, accessible because it is based on humour, magical effets and an aesthetic approach that is, all in all, quite classical. »

Beyond a shared fascination with the illusion of early cinema, Pierrick Sorin and Fernand Léger both focus on giving an aesthetic and choreographic dimension to banal objects taken from our daily lives. Across generations, they also share a common conception of the figure of the artist, who does not appear as a brilliant demiurge isolated from the worries of human civilization, but as a craftsman, a modest « worker of art ».

Exhibition curatorship:

Anne Dopffer, General Curator of Heritage, Director of the National Museums of the 20th Century in the Alpes-Maritimes

Julie Guttierez, Head Curator of Heritage in the Fernand Léger national Museum