These are two large landscapes of sea and night, hung as a diptych. On the canvas on the right, a fragile skiff, loaded with human silhouettes, can be seen. On the one on the left, the tragedy has occurred: bodies lie among the waves in the darkness. Dated 2015, this Black Dawn by the Franco-Chinese painter Yan Pei-Ming remains sadly relevant as dozens of illegal migrants continue to die trying to cross the Channel or the Mediterranean. It is one of the shocks of the Louvre-Lens exhibition devoted to exile, or rather to “Exiles” (1), seen through the eyes of artists.
Chosen exiles and internal exiles
The general curator of heritage Dominique de Font-Réaulx deliberately wanted to take a broad approach in addressing this burning subject. The “exiles” represented at the Louvre-Lens are thus first and foremost those who have always marked the destiny of humanity, from Adam and Eve expelled from paradise, painted by Marc Chagall (himself exiled from Vitebsk) passing by by the odyssey of Ulysses, revisited by the writer James Joyce (Irish based in Trieste) and illustrated by Henri Matisse.
The exhibition also focuses on all forms of exile and not only those suffered, imposed by war, hunger or political circumstances, like the painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, forced to go into exile after the Revolution, or the communard Gustave Courbet, who ended his life as a refugee in Switzerland.
The journey evokes chosen exiles, notably by artists wishing to broaden their horizons, including Yan Pei-Ming himself, who left his native China at the age of 19 to come and train at the Dijon School of Fine Arts. At the risk of confusing its subject, the exhibition even addresses cases of internal exile, such as that of Henri Michaux who, from 1955, explored his “inner space” while drawing in ink under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug, mescaline.
Resist and create
Basically, “we are all exiles (…) It is a state where human fragility shines through, the dangers that threaten it but also the formidable capacity of men and women to reinvent themselves.writes Dominique de Font-Réaulx (2), in a rather idealistic fraternal impulse in the face of tensions, rejections and violence against refugees which are increasing today in Europe or the United States. It’s a shame that these are more or less evaded in the hanging. Only the photographs full of empathy by certain photographers like Mathieu Pernot on the island of Lesbos or Bruno Serralongue, Gilles Raynaldi and Pascale Consigny in the “jungle” of Calais implicitly betray the unworthy welcome reserved by our societies for those who have had to leave everything behind.
However, notes of hope exist, like these artists who manage to overcome the trauma of exile through creation. A virulent opponent of “Napoleon the Little”, Victor Hugo, a refugee at Hauteville House in Guernsey, drew fruitful inspiration there and wrote Contemplations, The Legend of the Centuries, Les Miserables… Khaled Dawwa, a Syrian refugee in France, sculpted an immense model of the ruined street where he lived in Damascus, which he retouches at each exhibition like a living memory. As for Roméo Mivekannin, he recomposed the images of the deportation by the French of his ancestor, Béhanzin, king of Abomey, on a textile dyed with a voodoo elixir. A way of reweaving the tears of one’s own history.
(1) “Exiles, artists’ views” at the Louvre-Lens, until January 20, 2025.
(2) Catalog with texts by D. de Font-Réaulx, Delphine Diaz, Hala Mohammad, Annabelle Ténèze, Alexis Nouss, Kamel Daoud. Ed. Louvre-Lens/RMNGP, 295 p., €35.
