Romain Bernini Voyages à Giphantie

Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Franck created the Fondation in 2023 with the intention to dedicate its spaces not only to photographers of all styles and generations, but also to “painters, sculptors, and draftsmen.” After the exhibition of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures in 2005, followed three years later by Saul Steinberg’s drawings, the Fondation now renews its commitment to presenting other types of practices by showing the paintings of Romain Bernini. For around twenty years, this French artist, born in 1979, has been developing an impressive body of work situated at the crossroads of figuration and a form of urban esotericism. He captures moments that function as hypotheses. His compositions depict latent situations in which figures in search of meaning embody kinds of living enigmas. The series of paintings presented here for the first time is inspired by a curious little eighteenth-century book, Giphantie , by Charles Tiphaigne. Guided by a “prefect,” this journey through an imaginary land inhabited by “elemental spirits” belongs to the tradition of utopian tales. It allows its author to criticize the society of his time while giving free rein to his imagination. Published in 1760, this short work is best known for predicting the advent of modern technologies such as the remote transmission of images and sound, surveillance techniques, contact lenses, freeze-dried food, and many others. But above all, it describes—more than half a century before Nicéphore Niépce’s earliest experiments in 1816, and nearly eight decades before the official announcement of Louis Daguerre’s invention in 1839, a method of producing images that already resembles photography, and so we find our way back to it. Curator of the exhibition Clément Chéroux Director, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson