At the invitation of the Musée National Marc Chagall, artist Jérémy Griffaud (b. 1991) has created an immersive multimedia installation on the theme of biodiversity and the hybridization of living things. Designed to echo Chagall’s work, the exhibition takes the form of a new experience of painting, between materiality and symbolic language, both enhanced by the contribution of digital technology.

Inspired by the painted cycle of the Biblical Message, a masterpiece of universal and spiritual significance and the heart of the museum’s permanent collection, Jérémy Griffaud created a panoramic mapping covering the entire surface of the walls. Four of Chagall’s paintings in particular caught his attention, on the themes of the original Paradise and its loss (Paradise, Adam and Eve driven from Paradise), dreams (Jacob’s Dream) and hospitality (Abraham and the Three Angels).

Conceived as a looped journey, the visual animation takes the viewer to the center of a teeming, dreamlike world where passages occur between Edenic gardens and island cities, between the underworld and the celestial expanse. In this movement towards interiority or elsewhere, a multitude of hybrid beings swarm, their gestures and movements themselves repeated. An eternal return to oneself that, like Chagall’s works, contains the different times of the world: past, present and future, lived or imagined.

To build up and inhabit this virtual universe with its multiple levels of reality, Jérémy Griffaud produced almost 300 drawings, a selection of which is presented in the exhibition. The choice of watercolor allows the artist to play with the textural and fading effects of paint on paper, which are then digitized and retranscribed by three-dimensional modeling. Alongside these works, preparatory sketches of Chagall’s four paintings are also on display: they illustrate the Vitebsk painter’s creative process in its various technical stages, as well as its narrative and symbolic evolutions.

Jérémy Griffaud and Marc Chagall share a confidence in the effectiveness of the tools and means of painting, as well as a certain taste for play, to propose sensory and poetic environments. In the singularity of their plastic language, the infinite richness of detail opens up to all manner of discoveries and interpretations.

Jérémy Griffaud holds a DNSEP option art (Master’s degree), obtained in 2017 at Pavillon Bosio, l’École Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques de la Ville de Monaco. The public has been able to experience his work in numerous artistic venues such as La Panacée in Montpellier, the Four Domes Museums in Wroclaw, and the Shenzen Museum of Art. Some of his artistic residencies have led him to work in Norway, Poland and Malaysia. In 2023, he was awarded a residency at Villa Medici with the XR Farnese program. His Dungeon project has won two awards, at the Boden Film Festival in Sweden and the Emerald Peacock Film Festival in St Petersburg.