Isabelle Giovacchini, "What was, What is"

Born from an invitation, this contemporary counterpoint allows Isabelle Giovacchini to unfold further her poetics of the accident, woven from gaps and traces. In the storerooms of the Musée Bourdelle, where she spent many hours, the artist selected sculpted and photographic pieces to reflect on the passage of time, which, even as it erodes things, reveals marvelous exhumations. The ruin of time holds a promise: Giovacchini seizes it to offer restitutions and new proposals that invite us to see Bourdelle’s photographic work anew, recalling his profound passion for the power of images.

This display, composed of seven series forming a visual narrative, offers an opportunity to grasp the scope of Isabelle Giovacchini’s work, which is regularly exhibited in France and abroad.

Propeller

In her attentive quest to capture the spirit of the place — the genius loci — Isabelle Giovacchini carefully gathered various botanical specimens from the garden of the Musée Bourdelle, selecting them for their distinctive forms and evocative historical presence. Back in the shadowed quiet of her
studio, she composed photograms by arranging these natural fragments — in this case, honeysuckle — on photosensitive paper, briefly allowing them to meet the light before revealing their hidden imprints in the developing process. Invented in the mid-19th century by the pioneers of photography, photograms conjure starkly contrasted images that seem to oscillate between presence and absence. By harnessing two simultaneous sources of light, the artist conjures an illusion of volume, offering a delicate echo of life’s fragility captured in a luminous silhouette.

U-turn

The storage rooms of the Musée Bourdelle house countless molds, designed to produce multiple plaster casts from a single model. Essential to the reproduction process of sculpture, these
heterogeneous forms resemble curious chrysalises. Isabelle Giovacchini unearthed several of these molds, drawn to them by their resemblance to human faces, their enigmatic contours, or inscriptions such as "Nuage" ("Cloud"), which — much like the absurd poetry of René Magritte — stand at odds with their apparent form. Photographed in the pale, luminous glow of one of the museum’s former studios, these molds compose an uncanny gallery of emerging faces, echoing Bourdelle’s own marble Muse, which he photographed to immortalize both his process and the birth of his creations.

Penelope Won't Wait

A major figure in Bourdelle’s sculptural work, Pénélope (1905–1912) inspired several variations, including Femme bras levés (Woman With Arms Raised, 1907) and Femme bras dans le dos (Woman with Arms Behind Her Back, 1908), which diverge from the original through the almost choreographic movement of the arms. In response, Isabelle Giovacchini has arranged two casts of each of these variations around the central figure of Penelope, composing a syncopated dance reminiscent of chronophotography — that technique of breaking down the movement of a living being or object into sequential images. The title of the ensemble, a nod to the original sculpture’s name — Pénélope attendant Odysseus (Penelope Waiting For Odysseus) — seems to suggest that the feminine realm must be claimed, far from any notion of stillness.

Lightning

Bourdelle had a particular fondness for a Vénus à sa toilette (Venus at Her Toilette, 1906), a delicate bather imbued with both classical and Cézannesque accents, to which he dedicated numerous photographs, capturing the sculpture from every angle. Isabelle Giovacchini selected two of these prints and, using a tripod, subjected them to an off- camera light source — sometimes grazing, sometimes frontal. This intuitive play of light conjures whimsical surface effects that at times dazzle the image itself. The artist then inverted the tonal values of the photographs, transforming them into strangely shadowy impressions, akin to photographic negatives.

Spectra

In 1905, within his painting studio, Bourdelle photographed two anonymous women draped in flowing white gowns. On the back of one of the prints, an inscription reveals that these two sisters — "a brunette and a redhead" — had posed for a pastel that has since been lost to time. This handwritten note, intriguingly reintroducing a trace of color into the black- and-white image, inspired a specific approach: at times filtered through red, a light source sweeps across the surface of the original print, tracing a lunar or solar path, diaphanous or flickering. Wrapped in this ectoplasmic halo, the face of the standing woman seems to slip away, to fade into absence — much like in a faded photograph of Le Baiser (The Kiss), Bourdelle’s marble sculpture, which is presented here alongside this polyptych.

Untitled (Cloud Window)

This display case offers, in a deliberately scattered arrangement, a glimpse into the layered meanings of Isabelle Giovacchini’s work and her deep-rooted fascination with imprints and appropriations. A family photo album, with one page partially veiled beneath a sheet of crumpled tissue paper, enters into dialogue with the plaster cast of a solitary eye — detached from the iconic Herakles Archer (Herakles the Archer). Compositions derived from damaged original glass plates sit alongside a peculiar mold, for which the artist proposes a photographic interpretation displayed nearby. Photograms, crafted from botanical specimens gathered in the gardens of the Musée Bourdelle, celebrate the artifice of photography itself, which captures the fleeting beauty of the natural world. This collection of tools and fragments, at times enigmatic, houses the forms and gestures developed throughout the sequences of the current exhibition.