METZ.- The exhibition covers two levels, on the first “Lost in Darkness” features night-time as we know it: a moment we live through daily whether lit by the stars or a street lamp, when nightfall arouses our innermost feelings, reveals our obsessions, and conjures up our dreams. On the second level “From Intimacy to Cosmos” focusses on an abstract and cosmogonic relationship to night-time, when stars are observed. One understands the tangible aspects of the night sky and wonders where we stand in this universe.

Designed by Pascal Rodriguez, assisted by Perrine Villemur, the immersive scenography accompanies the visitor’s experience as they travel into the night. The layout of the first gallery follows the pattern of a town the visitor can wander through, at the opposite end they arrive at a large apse dedicated to the world of dreams and the Surrealists’ connection to the night. Aside from specific installations, the long corridors are equipped with a 3D audio effect system offering the visitor a multi-sensorial experience.

As for the layout of the second gallery its design is more regular with a series of open spaces including a spacious room at the centre dedicated to large format paintings. The exhibition closes with a monumental cube that houses a Ambiante Spaziale by Lucio Fontana. The bay window (gallery 3) looks onto the city and its night lights that can be contemplated.

LOST IN DARKNESS
At night perceptions are altered, first and foremost vision is impaired resulting in, both literally and figuratively, a loss of bearings. Details are blurred, shadows begin to stretch, shapes take on a dark foreboding nature and, as the horizon fades, the night sky looms. One must either grope and stumble or simply surrender to the elation. A number of nocturnal motifs have travelled through time, the tree for instance is a versatile subject: in daylight its lines are sharp however as night falls is mass darkens to a threat; reflections on water echo the failing light, mirroring the visual distortions of nightfall: undulating, out of focus, murky; our states of mind mutate with the landscape.

When entering the first room of the exhibition, the visitors step into darkness, little by little as their vision becomes accustomed to obscurity they find they are in a projection room: a video by Jennifer Douzenel shows a night sky alive with tiny fireflies like a forever shifting star chart.

Similarly, urban scenes throughout the 20th century depict night-time as intoxicating and theatrical. Far from the traditional opposition between a romantic, melancholic night, under a canopy of stars, in the countryside, doomed to disappear, and a bright city night driven by work and pleasures, with the night tide comes a different sensorial experience, even in a capital city: halos, reflections, vibrations, flashing lights create an abstract vocabulary that emphasizes that special thrill of the night, the realm of the indistinct.

THE NIGHT DWELLERS
In the early 19th century, public gas lighting was spreading throughout Europe and along with it came the first lamp posts, then in 1879 electricity revolutionized the nocturnal environment both out in the streets and at home. Artists began capturing the glow of artificial light with enthusiasm, even idealizing it (‘We must destroy moonlight!’ proclaimed the Futurist Marinetti). Night lighting ended up uncovering what daytime hid: the turpitudes of Mankind. All sorts of strange characters stepped out of the dark into the light, some disturbingly strange, some criminal, some members of the feverish cosmopolitan nightlife when anything was possible. Street scenes at eye level were ubiquitous in the first quarter of the 20th century, often acting as visual testimonials relaying strong social criticism, namely in the case of German Expressionism and New Objectivity.

NOCTURNAL OBSESSIONS
In the dead of night, the city returns the artist to the solitary studio. Sickly insomniacs sometimes in dire need of inspiration, such nocturnal painters are troubled by obsessions: the quest for their singular voice, conversations with ghostly shadows, automatic writing, memory games, resistance, and the temptation of alcohol to fuel the sleepless nights. Obsessions in which death lingered embodied by the geometrid moth which accompanied their nightly probing into the depths of the self; indeed like the moth, the artist might fly too close to the flame.

THE ETERNAL EYES
“More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us.” An excerpt from Hymns to the Night written in 1800 by Novalis, a poem the Surrealists held in high esteem in the 1920s. Twilight is a portal to one’s inner world in which reason is left asleep and apparitions and metamorphosis are welcome; it is the heart of the Surrealist revolution. The desire to “entrap the sun” haunts these artists since the night is theirs, not for its pleasures but as the realm of the subconscious, of digressions and dreams. Hence the night is a medium and nocturnal living a creative act of liberation.

THE STAR EATERS
Contemplating a starry night is like looking into the universe, it produces another sort of vertigo, since scale and perspective are distorted by the cosmic vortex.
A longing to reach the stars, to build a stairway to the milky way, even to “eat the stars” (reference to Georges Bataille's text entitled Les mangeurs d’étoiles — The Star Eaters) , often inspired 20th century artists reflecting their desire to master the relentless movement of the cosmos, as would a demiurge, or simply to manifest one’s part in it — an intuition modern astronomers and astrophysicists have indeed confirmed: we come from and are made up of stardust.

ENWRAPPED IN THE NIGHT
A star lit sky is difficult to copy. It eludes immobility. Its definition evolves after each space probe. Therefore how is the essence of such an elusive subject to be captured? By erasing the image and replacing it with matter, the lack of form, and the sense of space, of emptiness, the artist gets close to the substance of night. “Night, writes Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of perception , is not an object before me; it enwraps me and infiltrates through all my senses, stifling my recollections and almost destroying my personal identity.”

The exhibition closes with the reconstitution of a monumental Spatial Environment [Ambiente Spaziale] created by Lucio Fontana in 1967. The visitor is invited to enter an artificial night in which “both sense of measure and time are lost”.