PLURI-ELLES

Women take centre stage in the new exhibition PLURI-ELLES, Immersive resonances: women in Olsommer's symbolism and the contemporary work of Sofia Bonati.

The exhibition invites visitors to cross-reference Olsommer's sacred women, symbols of his metaphysical questions, with those of Sofia Bonati, an Argentinian artist-illustrator based near London.

Like an underground vein, questions about the soul, God and immortality permeate Olsommer's life and work. The man who wrote in his diaries, "Symbols are in my blood", summoned the figures of women to "translate the Beauty of the invisible world into the form of the visible". As mediators between the worlds that the exhibition seeks to bring to light, they enable Olsommer to inscribe his experience of the sacred in the depths of time.

Although the first names Sofia Bonati gives to her women are initially inspired by the cities in Italo Calvino's novel Invisible Cities, the artist describes them as figures whose presence radiates. She has a taste for visual enigmas akin to the Surrealists, and plays with blurring the contours of her female figures and the backgrounds of her compositions. Immobile, anchored in the here and now, her women contrast with the moving backgrounds against which the artist places them, underlining their ability to inhabit the world they leave their mark on. Their hypnotic gazes resonate silently with the world of the Veyras painter.

The Olsommer paintings in the exhibition come from the museum's reserves, on loan from institutions and private collectors.

In the attic space, visitors are invited to take part in a participatory device on nocturnal dreams, associated with symbolism and the dream diaries of Hélène Kiener, who was a pupil of the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung and with whom Olsommer maintained a special long-term friendship.