Carte blanche to Camille Chastang

This temporary exhibition takes the form of an installation combining wallpaper, works on paper and ceramics. It highlights the decorative richness of the Arc de triomphe while revealing its sensitive and organic dimension.

The monument's sculpted ornaments constitute a powerful symbolic vocabulary, originally celebrating military victory, the glory of armies and national memory. The palms, which are omnipresent in the Salle de l'Attique, embody both triumph and homage, placing the stone in a solemn and commemorative register.

In dialogue with these motifs, Camille Chastang 's work reveals their sensitive and political significance. The ornament becomes the bearer of stories, silences and absences - particularly those of women, whose flowers and palms have never found a place at the foot of the monument.

Installed in the Salle des Palmes, the work questions the political and poetic dimensions of the ornament, and more broadly the question of the presence and absence of women within this emblematic heritage site. Camille Chastang weaves a subtle link between the intimate and the monumental, between decoration and memory.

Born in 1994, Camille Chastang lives and works between Normandy and Paris. After initial training in textile design, she moved away from the applied arts to study at the Beaux-Arts, where she developed a critical approach to drawing as a medium in its own right. She graduated from the Villa Arson in Nice in 2020.

Her artistic practice, which is both drawn and written, is part of a plastic and theoretical research that questions the hierarchy of mediums, forms and subjects within artistic practices. Through drawing, decoration and ornament, Camille Chastang seeks to deconstruct the power relationships and value systems that structure art history, while giving a central place to narratives that are often relegated to the margins.

She has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Paris, Nice, Marseille and Lyon, as well as solo shows at the Abbaye de Fontevraud, the FRAC Picardie and the Double-V gallery (Marseille/Paris). At the same time, she is developing an important work of mediation and transmission, regularly collaborating with various audiences through workshops and creative projects.

She is a prize-winner in the Création en cours programme with the Ateliers Médicis, and has taken part in residencies such as Rouvrir le monde at the Collection Yvon Lambert in Avignon. Her drawings have also been published in the contemporary drawing magazines Roven and The Drawer.

Printemps du dessin

Created in 2017 by the team behind Drawing Now Paris, the first contemporary art fair dedicated exclusively to drawing, Printemps du dessin celebrates the diversity of this practice throughout France.

From 20 March to 21 June, by bringing together venues as diverse as sites managed by the Centre des monuments nationaux, art libraries, FRACs and art centres, Printemps du dessin brings culture to the very heart of the regions and responds to the Ministry of Culture's desire for a "Printemps de la ruralité".

Through exhibitions, workshops, conferences and meetings between artists and the public, the medium of drawing is deployed in all its forms, offering the public a close-up immersion in artistic creation. These nationwide events bring different audiences into close contact with the artists and their work at exhibitions and meetings. Drawing facilitates these encounters because it is a more direct and accessible medium.