View of the group exhibition, Puissantes, 2023, Photo © François Fernandez Puissantes.
View of the group exhibition, Puissantes, 2023, Photo © François Fernandez Puissantes. This strong, slightly defiant term expresses a wish to bring together a line of thought around a selection of works by five women artists of different generations, all established in the national art scene and living on the Côte d’Azur. At the heart of a 16th-century citadel, a historically male and military place, and in an exhibition room that was once a chapel, the wink is amusing: works made by women whose subjects evoke their intimate relationship with emotions, landscapes and History. The idea of the feminine sacred also underpins our purpose: the aim is to dare combine power and sacredness by evoking the female body and its excessive yet alluring aestheticisation – the rose, a symbol of love, is the attribute par excellence for evoking an antinomic femininity, at once seductive for its petals and dangerous for its thorns, as in the work of Frédérique Nalbandian. It is a matter of daring to associate emotion with the detached coldness of the studio camera lens, in the practice of Natacha Lesueur. It is a matter of mixing violence and amusement, as in the series of works by Caroline Rivalan. It is a matter of presenting a loving gaze at landscapes and the natural environment that nonetheless seeks to dominate them, as in the work of Anne-Laure Wuillai. It is a matter of questioning the invisible and the discreet, with the affirmation of the self and of one’s voice, through the work of Mona Barbagli. From these paradoxes, power is born; from these intertwined complexities emerges a simple idea: to show five views of the world. Since 2022, La Citadelle and its museums have taken advantage of their heritage renovation works to renew the venue’s artistic programme, inviting contemporary artists and collaborating with leading dynamic cultural players, such as the Galerie Eva Vautier. The relationship to the site is one of the programme’s privileged focuses, as is the link with the modern art collections of the Musées de La Citadelle. In this exhibition, you will find a facsimile of a work by the artist Christine Boumeester, held in our collections, and of which we are proud to be the largest public custodian. The entire collection devoted to her, as well as that of her husband Henri Goetz, is currently being restored. La Citadelle – Musées & Centre d’art et de culture Christophe Trojani Mayor of Villefranche-sur-Mer Monica Laugier, Deputy Mayor for Culture Camille Frasca, director, assisted by Luciana Ribeiro da Costa Mona Barbagli Born in 1995 and a graduate of the Pavillon Bosio and then of the école des beaux-arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire, Mona Barbagli is an artist who uses her own emotions and her feelings in response to lived situations as her primary medium, which she recreates alone during performances. On a trip to Senegal, in the city of Dakar in 2019, she conceived a work entitled “Paroles ineffables”, centred on speech and its translation, through…
