AVIGNON.- In resonance with the sixtieth Avignon Theatre Festival, the Collection Lambert in Avignon proposes a summer exhibition on the portrait and the image of the actor entitled Figures of the Player, the Paradox of the Actor: title referring to Diderot’s famous text on the art of theatrical performance. The project both reinforces the festival’s desire to firmly base its program in contemporary art and confirms the Collection Lambert’s desire to mix in the universe of the theatre.

In keeping with other Collection Lambert exhibitions of an historical dimension such as Artists’ Collections (Summer 2001), Figures of the Player, the Paradox of the Actor is composed of more than 600 artworks spanning four centuries of theatrical creation. This historical mise en abîme is at the core of the exhibition which, without wishing to be either exhaustive nor chronological, will reveal the evolution of representations of the actor, their acting, postures, stage costumes but also their social role - from courtesan to prince’s closest advisor, from admiration to recognition, from unanimous exemplarity to ironic caricature or finally to a model to follow for generations.

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to two exceptional partnerships: the Library- Museum of the Comédie-Française has permitted an ensemble of rare loans and prestigious pages from theatrical history will be presented from the collections of the Department of Theatrical Arts of the National Library of France.

The point of departure for this exhibition is anchored in Roni Horn’s series of photographs, never before seen in France, in which the American artist has requested Isabelle Huppert, during various photographic shoots, to reincarnate her great roles - the actress using only her face and her expressivity to evoke her roles in Medea, Madame Bovary or La Dentellière, Orlando or The Pianist…

Mirroring these images will be a series of artworks featuring late eighteenth century Japanese actors in which the great master printmakers succeed in capturing the poses of Kabuki theatre actors by the requisite speed of their brushstroke and the technique of China ink on rice paper.

With ink and a brush for the Japanese artists or a camera for Horn, each time the intention to capture the actor’s expression and vitality presides, the essence of the actor incarnating a role, the catharsis operating between the actor becoming the other and the spectator, often dumbfounded, taken in a state of immediate identification.

If this type of aesthetic confrontation is at the very heart of the operation of the exhibition, the great schools, trends or seminal periods in theatre: tragedy and comedy, classical or romantic, expressionist or theatre of the absurd will also be addressed in an original way. Just as three knocks of the baton signal the beginning of a performance, this show will begun as visitors arrive outside the museum, the street decorated with giant flags hoisting up images of theatrical figures from the 1950s to the present day. The first darkened room shall be dedicated to the seventh art.