Discover Contemporary Art and Cultural Heritage in Deux-Sèvres with Yannick Jaulin and Florian de la Salle

This month, Yannick Jaulin takes us to Deux-Sèvres, to Thouars, a medieval city which opens its heritage sites to contemporary artists.

In the former Jeanne d’Arc chapel, which has become an art center of national interest, Yannick Jaulin meets the visual artist Florian de la Salle. He will be the next artist to take over the nave to install a monumental creation in blotting paper, painted with watercolor ink, with a very astonishing technique.

He will then discover a new cultural third place, the MZ, installed in what was the Jean Macé nursery school. Today, people of all ages come to learn about it with exhibitions and plays, mini-concerts and artistic workshops. Three of the members of the founding collective will be our guides, along with the photographer Alain Le Bec who is currently exhibiting in this place.

But it is with the most emblematic place in Thouarsais, the Château d’Oiron, that this program begins. For 30 years, in this historic heritage site, the most daring contemporary creations have interacted in perfect harmony with the old Renaissance stones.

Jean-Luc Meslet, administrator of Château d’Oiron

In the Château d’Oiron, Yannick finds Jean-Luc Meslet, administrator of the place. He shows him around the different rooms, from the Renaissance painting gallery to the Curios & Mirabilia rooms, decorated by contemporary artists in 1993. Wandering through the armory room or even the king’s bedroom, Yannick discovers the many artistic interventions intended to fill the gaps in the collections of the man who made the castle famous, the king’s grand squire Claude Gouffier. The walk ends in the most spectacular rooms: the room of geometric figures by Sol Lewitt and the rooms dedicated to the inhabitants of Oiron with the creations of Christian Boltanski and Raoul Marek. A large-scale program unprecedented in France in a heritage site of this type.

Florian de La Salle at the Chapelle Jeanne d’Arc Art Center

Yannick goes to the Chapelle Jeanne d’Arc Art Center, in the heart of Thouars. Another heritage site dedicated today to the practice of contemporary art and experimental exhibitions. In the spectacular nave, around a hundred artists have succeeded one another over the past 30 years, such as Vincent Lamouroux, Daniel Buren and Veit Stratmann. Yannick has an appointment with the Poitevin visual artist Florian de la Salle who will be the next to create in the chapel a monumental work in blotting paper 45m long and 2m high. His research work on color led him to experiment with the phenomenon of capillarity in a partially immersed support to obtain different colors and shapes. He explains his project to Yannick and demonstrates his astonishing technique.

Meeting with the Toctoctoc collective and visit to the cultural third place Le MZ

After six years of maturation, the cultural third place Le MZ, supported by theassociation TOCTOCTOC !, was born in the former Jean Macé municipal school. A living space that allows you to bring together different audiences around your café/boutique and offer them cultural events (concerts, exhibitions, theater evenings) and to participate in shared workshops. Delphine, Sophie and Bertrand, members of this collective, tell Yannick Jaulin the genesis of this project intended to energize the city center and highlight creators and artists. They introduced him to the photographer Alain Le Bec, whose exhibition currently decorates the walls of the MZ, often humorous, but also poetic portraits.