Eight artists around Jazz by Henri Matisse: Etel Adnan, Agnès Thurnauer, Pierre Charpin, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Isabelle Ferreira, Claire Trottignon, Alexandre Benjamin Navet, Tania Mouraud.

In 1947, Henri Matisse published an album of twenty colored plates with handwritten ink aphorisms, considered one of the pinnacles of twentieth-century artist's books.

Almost eighty years after its publication, this book retains all its freshness, an extraordinary visual impact, which we wanted to revive in this collective exhibition. It's not a monument, but rather a certain candor that brings to mind the world of childhood. Its strength comes from the marvelous harmony between the worked spontaneity of the colorist's gesture, whose luminous shapes spring from the scissor cuts running through the gouache paper, and the cursive handwriting in ink, which plays a purely "spectacular" role. The images of the circus or the lagoons are not illustrations of this poem, which is nothing other than an inner rhythm, which comes like jazz, an improvisation in tune with the audience.

Matisse's Jazz sets the tempo for this selection of works, which all revolve around cut-out color, the color that gives rhythm to and constructs space, whether on the page or in a volume.

Coming from different worlds, fashion, design or the visual arts, each plays his part according to his affinity with Matisse, a filiation that blossoms into so many distinct but not totally unrelated expressions.

The surprise comes from the discovery that everyone, at some point, has thought of Matisse, of that liberating yet simple gesture of cutting color and drawing.

Claudine Grammont
Exhibition curator