Famous
22/09/2012
The FAMOUS exhibition, which closes its doors today at midnight in the Galerie Haute, a private space in the Palais de Tokyo, has a singular history. It was born out of a not-so-likely encounter between two photographic outsiders who don’t consider themselves artists, Pascal Rostain and Bruno Mouron, and a newcomer to the sometimes academic world of contemporary art: the Louis Roederer Foundation.
After accompanying the exhibitions at the BNF of Sophie Calle, Raymond Depardon, Bettina Rheims, Markus Raetz and many others, after helping to preserve the filmed memory of JR’s installation on the Île Saint-Louis, after being associated with the opening of the new Palais de Tokyo and more specifically the creation of Jean-Michel Alberola’s extraordinary Salle des Instructions, now the Fondation Louis Roederer wanted to venture outside the unchallenged realms of the art world, and get down and dirty with these street characters, the much-maligned paparazzi who hide behind rubbish bins (the contents of which Mouron and Rostain have photographed and exhibited around the world) to capture a silhouette, a face, a gesture, a look.
Pascal Rostain and Bruno Mouron may not be artists, but the images of Solzhenitsyn, Orson Welles, Samuel Beckett, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger and Brigitte Bardot that they have created over thirty years of photography are icons. The Louis Roederer Foundation, proud to have been able to show them to the public, thanks the Palais de Tokyo, and especially its president Jean de Loisy, for hosting them. It would also like to thank the Muzéo agency, which kindly produced the remarkable set design for this exhibition, filmed here in 4 minutes and 25 seconds by Rafaël Lévy.