In October 2020 at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris the Franco-Swiss artist Agnès Thurnauer will install her functional sculpture Matrices Chromatiques (Chromatic Matrixes), created as part of the powerful series Matrices/Assises (Matrixes / Seated).

This installation created in brushed aluminum forms the word “Chromatiques”, a word chosen by the artist and the museum. It consists of 12, 45-centimeter letters from the series Matrices/Assises.

Deployed across several locations around the museum, the artwork symbolizes the idea of a diffraction of Claude Monet’s Water Lilies on the upper level of the building. The installation occupies many spaces in the museum’s building and grounds, going into the gardens and the galleries, like water lilies of language.

From the outside, four matrixes signal that the Musée de l’Orangerie is in dialogue with the garden’s permanent sculptures. Visible from the interior through the glass roof, it forms a reflection and reminder of the 8 other Matrixes inside. These works are installed in the building, under the glass roof leading to the Water Lilies and in the large renovated gallery, bathed in light, facing the masterpieces of Picasso, Modigliani and Matisse.

Arranged in this way, these brushed aluminium sculptures, as many of the “nymphéas-lettres“ (Water Lily letters), give out an aura of Monet’s œuvre in a waxed concrete case within the hieratic beauty of the Musée de l’Orangerie designed by Olivier Brochet. 

The Matrices Chromatiques project, initiated in 2017 by Cécile Debray, Director of the Musée de l’Orangerie, was made possible by the patrons Sophie Javary and Alain Bernard, who offered this artwork to the CNAP (Centre National des Arts Plastiques – national centre of visual arts in France) making it available to the Musée de l’Orangerie.