MES NUITS SONT PLUS BELLES QUE VOS JOURS
A GROUP SHOW
Saturday November 30 – Saturday December 14, 2024
The night is a powerful revealer of our true personalities. Under the nocturnal cloak, our real personalities are released, as liberated as possible, those who cannot exist under the shackles and diktats of the decorum of the day. Beautiful at night, adorned with stars, the “dark side” of our lives evolves and flows within us like a precious contraband elixir that intoxicates us, becoming the mirror that sublimates us, like a perfect illusion, the mirror of our souls in perdition, in lack of extreme sensations, ready for all excesses, addictive, the night is limitless.
Anonymous and seductive, the night can also adorn itself with a jet-colored velvet mask, and transform us into superheroes and super heroines, in order to give free rein to our most secret impulses, to our most unspoken fantasies.
Carried away by the crowd, in a club, to vibrate to the hypnotic beats of the music, in a cellar, in search of unidentified encounters, to satisfy our intimate desires, the night is a faithful companion who does not judge, who does not condemn no behavior , unlike its false twin sister, the day, which, despite our will, forces us to be in representation and present to the daytime world a more “decent” version of ourselves.
The night is the playground of our indecency, it alone is the accomplice of our crazy adventures until the dawn which, mercilessly, tolls its death knell and puts an end to our waking dreams. The morning will be more merciless…
In terms of colors, the night adds a veil of mystery to everything it illuminates, paradoxically, with sparkling and exciting bursts of light, mixing veils of moon or stardust…
There is a famous French saying from the 17th century that goes: “At night, all cats are gray.” This saying can be read from different angles, from ribaldness, a French specificity, which would affirm that all women, beautiful or ugly, look alike, once night falls and which plays on the double meaning of the word “cat” which designates also the “dark continent” of women, according to the well-known formula of Sigmund Freud, with scientific significance which explains that the night vision of humans is greatly impaired, unlike the increased vision of felines, so we no longer distinguish the elements that present themselves to us, which is conducive to multiple confusions and awkwardness of all kinds.
We all have a unique appeal, at night, even in the middle of a crowd, everyone can stand out and attract attention and “the lights of the night”.
The title of the group exhibition,, « Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours » (« My nights are more beautiful than your days”) is borrowed from the title of a French novel by Raphaëlle Billetdoux, published in 1985, Prix Renaudot 1985, which tells the story of a destructive passion whose unit of time is night, adapted for the cinema by Andrrzej Zulawski in 1989, with Sophie Marceau and Jacques Dutronc, and which takes up a sentence written by Jean Racine, where staying with his uncle in Uzès, in Provence, he wrote to a friend, “…and we have nights more beautiful than your days. »
This title, “Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours » (« My nights are more beautiful than your days”), is the perfect metaphor to describe everything that the night facilitates, from the freedom of action to the excitement it diffuses in each of us.
The night is always and again, very fortunately, both this unrivaled place and this ideal moment which allows us to achieve this very particular state of mind, this imaginary elsewhere that we all seek in our modern and sometimes too tidy lives.