AVIGNON.- The Collection Lambert in Avignon is devoting a major exhibition to the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli in the museum’s new extension, opened in 2015.

Conceived with the artist, the exhibition features a group of about twenty of his recent sculptures, some created especially for Avignon. The sculptures are being presented in dialogue with series of emblematic works by Cy Twombly, Giulio Paolini and Louise Lawler, all influenced by mythology.

With the grace and the force of gestures or words, Cy Twombly’s paintings and drawings evoke antique myths; Giulio Paolini’s collages and installations - as conceptual as they are sacred - and Louise Lawler’s photos of Greek and Roman sculptures, taken with a touch of irony in the great museums that own them or in the homes of private collectors, are transported into a reflection on art history and contemporary art by bold arrangements, or by the very sculptures of Francesco Vezzoli.

Through the sensitive, unique dialogues with the classical heritage generated by such radical gestures, through Francesco Vezzoli’s works - consisting of ancient sculptures bought in auction houses for his transformation, rearrangement and completion - it is not only a question of observing how different generations of artists confront the history of 2000-year-old artworks, but also of sketching the outlines of the very notion of the contemporary in art. “It is as if this invisible light that is the darkness of the present cast its shadow on the past, so that the past, touched by this shadow, acquired the ability to respond to the darkness of the now.” (Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary ? in What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, Stanford University Press, 2009)

So long as we are in this place we shall not be free from her; it is as if our thoughts must be forever stained by some of her own dark illumination – the preoccupation of a stone woman inherited from a past whose greatest hopes and ideals fell to ruins. Behind and through her the whole idea of Greece glows sadly, like some broken capital, like the shattered pieces of a graceful jar, like the torso of a statue to hope. Lawrence Durrell, Reflections on a Marine Venus, 1953