Georges Rousse’s Utopia takes over the Abbaye de La Celle with two original site-specific creations and a retrospective, all centered on the artist’s continuing dialogue with painting, architecture, and photography.

In the cloister, the usual perception of space is disrupted by a deconstruction of its elements—vaults, walls, staircases—where color appears to have settled onto the stone like a living substance, shifting as the viewer moves. Two of these new installations feature Rousse’s recurring motifs: the circle and the color yellow, evoking the site’s spiritual essence, as well as black, in homage to Malevich’s Black Square on White Ground, a recurring source of inspiration for the artist.

Alongside these new pieces, a retrospective traces his journey since the 1980s, displaying key works that reflect the evolution of his relationship to space and material.

This infiltration of contemporary art within the confines of the 13th-century Provençal Romanesque monument proffers a renewed experience of the abbey—where the sacred gives rise to a form of timeless spirituality, and temporal boundaries dissolve within art and creation.

Curator: Laura Serani.