SAINT-LOUIS-LÈS-BITCHE .- The Fondation d’entreprise Hermès presents “Éclats du crépuscule”, an exhibition by visual artists Camille Fischer, François Génot and Nicolas Schneider at La Grande Place, Musée Saint-Louis.

“Éclats du crépuscule” is part of a series of four exhibitions organised in partnership with the Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS), which has been entrusted with the curatorship of La Grande Place from 2025 to 2027.

For the second exhibition of this partnership, the Musée d’Art Moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg has conceived four sequences that bring together the works of Camille Fischer, François Génot and Nicolas Schneider, three artists who live and work in eastern France. The exhibition unfolds like a musical composition with contrasting movements: the opening is slow and ascending, the first movement flows like an adagio tinged with melancholy, the second bursts forth allegretto, while the finale fades and gives way to silence. The three artists develop distinct practices sculpture, textile or engraved pieces, installations—yet succeed in establishing harmony within each act of this atmospheric journey.

The prelude takes shape in a first group of display cases that link “the world above and the world below,” where the artists play with telluric forces. The second sequence evokes a strange garden, where materials respond to one another, where shimmering meets roughness. The next sequence is that of excess—an explosion of the elements of water and fire, captured in their fallout as if after an eruption. The final one addresses ruin, “what remains,” and, perhaps, what is reborn despite it all. The drawn, engraved and forged works by Nicolas Schneider resonate with François Génot’s ceramics, charred fragments, and bouquets of grasses, while Camille Fischer installs a fountain and unfurls embroidered linens and silks within these theatre-like display cases that shine with the last glimmers of twilight.

Since 2014, the Foundation has organised exhibitions dedicated to contemporary creation through the lens of craftmanship at La Grande Place, Musée Saint-Louis. These exhibitions are conceived in collaboration with a local cultural institution and with the participation of the Saint-Louis cristallerie. After four exhibition cycles carried out successively with the Centre Pompidou-Metz, 49 Nord 6 Est – Frac Lorraine (Metz), the Centre d’art contemporain – Synagogue de Delme, and the art centre Vent des Forêts, the Foundation has entrusted its programming to the Musée d’Art moderne et contemporain de Strasbourg (MAMCS) for a cycle of four exhibitions from 2025 to 2027. Through this cycle, whose first exhibition was dedicated to Gretel Weyer, Estelle Pietrzyk, curator and chief heritage curator at the MAMCS, highlights artists whose practices are rooted in a rich and fertile local artistic environment.

Camille Fischer

Born in 1984 in Schiltigheim, lives and works in Strasbourg. Without hierarchy between fine arts and applied arts, Camille Fischer creates and stages worlds, oscillating between melancholy and bacchanal. While she is sensitive to the Symbolist legacy, she does not replay a score from centuries past but rather speaks to us of the present and its excesses through drawing, embroidery, installation and performance. Interested in the idea of the total work of art as well as that of the “Grand Tout” [Great Whole], she explores multiple artistic directions that stage nature and are marked by a formidable life force. Drawing from a vast universe of references ranging from Romantic poetry to the energy of the punk movement, Camille Fischer invites us to endure the present by confronting both its darkness and its glimmering.

François Génot

Born in 1981 in Strasbourg, lives and works in the Grand Est region of France. Since 2005, François Génot has developed an approach that translates his interest in the living.

Committed to a multi-media practice (drawing, sculpture, installation), his work respectfully and harmoniously resonates with the harmony of the animal, vegetal and mineral world whilst his artistic process is inspired by nature’s resilience. Teacher at the École supérieure d’Art de Lorraine in Metz, he is also implicated in a number of artistic and cultural projects taking action in rural areas, such as La maison des feuilles [The house of leaves], a research and creation project in Alsace Bossue. He has previously exhibited at La Grande Place in the exhibition “Cristallisations” in 2015.

Nicolas Schneider

Born in 1964, lives and works in Strasbourg and Moselle. Water and fire—this could briefly summarise the key elements of Nicolas Schneider’s work. The liquid element, first, whether in watercolour, ink, or works exploring evaporation, lies at the heart of many pieces on the borders of the invisible, each attempting to trace the path of the flow and the line dividing or meeting waters. Fire is the other primary element for this artist, whose bronzes and sculptures condense and reduce the landscape into structuring lines to form new worlds.