PARIS, FRANCE.- Musée d'Orsay presents Correspondances - Paul Gauguin / Robert Mangold - Maquette du quartier de l'Opéra / Annette Messager, o view through September 3, 2006. The concept consists of inviting a contemporary artist to present one of his or her pieces alongside a work which this artist has selected from the Museum collections. The resulting dialogue enables the collections to be perceived in a new light and lends a fresh resonance to their lasting modernity.

Paul Gauguin, Maison du Jouir - Robert Mangold, Column Structure I - Robert Mangold, an American artist born in 1937 and influenced by Newman and Rothko, is conscious of the primary influence of Abstract Expressionism on his work. He raises the question of monumentality in painting and the immediacy of its impact: its presence has an immediate effect: radiating in an unusual way, provoking an expansion of the actual space of the canvas into the space that surrounds it. Whereas minimalism may be defined as a radical restriction of the artist's gesture, giving prominence again to the intellectual character of the idea, Mangold always offers a more complex reality where the primacy of painting and a serene monumentality come together. By opening new possibilities for painting – a renewed liberty, – Mangold constantly places perception at the heart of his work, rejecting demonstrative effects by using a strict economy of means. Mangold has chosen the wood carving of the Maison du Jouir (1901) made by Gauguin for his studio in Atuana, Tahiti, as a reference for the architectural accomplishment of this work.

Quartier de l'Opéra - Annette Messager, Les Mystères de Paris - Since the early 1970s, Annette Messager has been developing a demanding body of work which enables her to show the different facets of her identity. Autobiographical details are the essence of her work and art is seen as the means to put across an individuality, Annette Messager the "trickster" or "collector"...

Rejecting all concepts and theories, her work echoes with ideas of surprise, of the weight of irony and distance, of her desire to tell a story, of her relationship with childhood, of her fascination for darkness and of the sudden appearance of unreality in the commonplace.

The model of the Opéra area chosen by Annette Messager reflects her attachment to the idea of circulation; the work denies all previous genius loci and generates its own space. The artists plays on changes in scale, peoples with new beings a part of the city, both immense and minute, with ghostly streets, empty and disquieting, a possible setting for a fantastic tale…