Eva Jospin and her fabulous silk room at Versailles

in XI^e In a Paris neighborhood, it’s as if his workshop is in the center of a mini-neighborhood, with the café across the street serving as his office. Under a glass roof, his assistants cut cardboard and prepare the installations that will arrive in large numbers this June. The program is tight. The first monumental occupation of the Orangery of Versailles with embroidered bands, inspired by the embroidery room of the Palazzo Colonna in Rome and the novel own room by Virginia Woolf. Silk room 350 sq. m.

Master intervention in the mineral environment. Eva Jospin is also currently exhibiting at the Galleria Continua in Paris and has just unveiled a concrete rock at the future Hôpital-Bicêtre metro station in the south of the capital. This whole spring program is absorbing him. He arrives a little later, very desolate, still with that Botticelli grace that frames his face. In fifteen fast years, the artist established herself with a definite talent in an artistic universe where nature and man reinvent themselves. From the beginning, the cardboard was one with its work, where there is also talk of embroidery, gardens, holiday architecture, trompillo, panoramas…

A creative spirit with an ancient and eclectic vocabulary that flies between XVIII^e and XIX^e centuries to establish itself in the 21st century^e. Created a fantasy universe where its forests rustle with mystery. Tour with the artist, behind the scenes.

A dream garden in a stone setting

“In the orangery I install 105 meters of embroideries for Dior (featured in the Fall-Winter 2021-2022 Haute Couture fashion show, Editor’s note) to which I added two additional tapes created for the exhibition and inspired by the Gardens of Versailles, more precisely the Lanslade Park and the Labyrinth Park engraving, which has now disappeared. I am fascinated by baroque caves. Embroidery becomes an imaginary garden, a tapestry of a thousand flowers… Like a huge panorama that will unfold, a continuous and progressive decor. We will be in the forest, then we will pass in front of a waterfall, an arch, a fountain, a cave… While walking, we will see a whole giant universe, under a stone arch (13 meters high), right below, Bernini’s monumental sculpture. Everything is huge! Orange is larger than the Hall of Mirrors (117 meters compared to the Hall of Mirrors’ 73). Wider, higher… I have already carried out disproportionate confrontations at Montmajor Abbey in Arles (Cenotaph2020), or at the Palais Palais in Avignon (Palace, 2023), where we fit into a stone circle. In the conservatory, which, unlike the other two spaces, has never had any wall decoration, we are there with a clean, almost modernist structure. This giant embroidered piece will impress. It’s crazy. In France we talk about the Palace of Versailles, but Versailles is a palace, the archetype of a European palace, with an accumulation of knowledge and knowledge, between craftsmen, artists, architects… an ensemble that takes us physically and that simultaneously draws an eye to detail.

Immersive Temptation

“My work borrows from three fields that are slightly different but come together: trompe-l’oeil, decor and sculpture. The trompe l’oeil is a flat surface. when we get down to it, what strikes us when it’s done well is the flatness. I try to have that effect. The decor is only light. That said, it is made up of form and light together, and as soon as you turn on the light, everything disappears. Then we see that it is made of foam or cardboard… The sculpture must be in every possible condition. We have to be able to see it from a distance, with light, like an environment, and we have to be able to get close and touch it, because the sculpture has to exist even two centimeters away, even at hand. I try to work on effects that mix and borrow from two so-called minor art forms: scenography and trompe l’oeil. We are in a dramatization of what the eye perceives, with false perspectives, corridors that are shortened to give the impression that they are longer… All this works from the moment the point of view is established within the picture, two-dimensional; a performance that, in fact, immediately reaches three dimensions. Festive architecture, theatrical decorations, architectural follies, garden art, stage design, art are things that interest me immensely because I associate them with other moments of the 19th century.^e century – to the invention of panoramas, dioramas, sections… We are in for something totally immersive for the eye and the senses. For me, the baroque garden and its caves are fascinating spaces of immersion and effect, in this matter of artifice. That’s why it’s important to look for a baroque fireplace in Versailles. Somehow I connect the areas that interest me. The Baroque Garden is a kind of sublime Euro Disney…”.

The box

“It was a material I used in the beginning because it gave me a lot of freedom to work with and it was abundantly available. My theme is to always be able to create. If tomorrow there’s no more cardboard left, which might be good for humanity, I’ll use something else. The interesting thing when you insist on a topic or material is that you focus, and then a lot appears. This is what happened to me. Starting with an ordinary material and completely transforming it, that’s where I put my sculptor’s touch. I stopped painting when I left Fine Arts, but if I continued, I’d like to do the same thing with painting, and it’s much more difficult. Finding the uniqueness of a material in its use is the work of the artist over the craftsman.”

Artistic landscape

“I create works to escape into dreams and for this escape to be a meeting place between the artist and the visitors. That’s why there are no people in my works, everyone should be able to inhabit them. That’s also why I saturate it with details, because it also takes a long time, because the detail will attract attention, stop us, let us get lost in it… I try to provoke the movement of the gaze; which I like to have when I look at a work and it takes me, I am back and forth between the general and the particular. In the work space, I try to create it almost physically. At the same time, this saturation, both in the forest and in this giant embroidery, also creates the invisible. This is the irony of contradiction, showing everything, we no longer distinguish a part of it. That’s why I’m so interested in the panorama, because it’s the idea of ​​encompassing a vision of the world. This is related to the representation of landscape in painting, which is highly criticized today, because we also criticize the concept of landscape as a form of distance between us and nature. Some people no longer want to use the word “landscape” to emphasize this appearance. And I, on the contrary, get a lot of inspiration from this performance. I immerse myself in it because it appeals to me like an object of imagination. Landscape becomes fiction. It is the artists who invent the landscape. Until then, we say “country”. The landscape is an artistic representation.”

The wanderer

“He leads the visit depending on the walking speed. It sets the rhythm of vision. You have to move forward, approach, go back… The way of looking is very free.”

at Galleria Continua

“The exhibition dialogues with Versailles, as if the presented works came from the embroideries of the Orangerie. We will see sculptures, micro-architectures, embroideries also produced by Chanakya’s workshops, two preparatory drawings for embroideries, reduced versions of some Versailles panels and, for the first time, a forest triptych in lined cardboard, a bronze version of it and another in its entirety. embroidered (by Amali workshops). It’s as if bridges, aqueducts, arches emerged from needlework…”.

Hôpital-Bicetre Station:

“On the facade of the extension station of line 14 of the metro line, created by the architect Jean-Paul Viguier, as part of the Tandem project (artist-architect in the 68 new stations of Greater Paris: the largest construction site of permanent works in Europe), I installed a 14 meter long and 8 a metre-high concrete rock ledge made up of superimposed layers where bronze vines proliferate. It’s a bit like we were trying to reproduce the troglodyte architecture, like the memory of the quarry to be built…”.

The garden

“My absolute dream would be to create my artistic garden with my follies, to work on the gesture of nature and sculpture, so that these two worlds coexist and meet. I talk about it a lot, but I don’t, I have to move on the subject… Even if the aesthetic of Niki de Saint-Fallet is not mine, he did what I would like to do: a baroque garden, a Tarot garden; From this point of view, it’s really my dream…”

“Eva Jospin-Versailles. Silk Room”, from June 18 to September 29 at the Orangerie de Versailles, Palace of Versailles.
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