To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the reopening of the Collège des Bernardins, Abdelkader Benchamma has been invited to create a vast installation especially designed for the Grand Nave. The exhibition will also figure in the programme of Paris’ Nuit Blanche 2018.

A profusion of immense, dynamic, abstract shapes will invade the floor of the Grand Nave, establishing a dialogue with the surrounding architecture of this place that is steeped in history.

Abdelkader Benchamma is famous for his in situ wall drawings, which match the scale of their place of exhibition. They are inspired by visual scenarios that result from his reflections on space – its physical reality, limits and zones of contact with mental space. At the heart of his work lie shifts in reality, intrusions of the invisible world, indeterminate materials in a state of transformation and minuscule catastrophes.

Cosmic inspirations

Benchamma’s piece draws its inspiration from the work of priest, astronomer and physicist Georges Lemaître (1894-1966). In parallel to his religious beliefs, Lemaître was one of the first men to propose theories on the origins of the universe and he is considered today to be the inventor of what he called the "hypothesis of the primeval atom", better known as the  “Big Bang” theory. Lemaître was a precursor in theorising about how galaxies are moving away from us. He formalised the notion that the universe is continually expanding and spoke in a poetic manner about “the lost echo of the creation of worlds”. At the crossroads of beliefs and science, the artist’s world echoes the astronomer priest’s own research.

How can one make tangible the invisible forces of the infinitely big? This question is recurrent in Abdelkader Benchamma’s work - developed here on a much larger scale, it will immerse visitors in a space far from the world and outside of time.