He is one of the most famous French contemporary artists in the world, and undoubtedly also one of the most popular, the facetious GérardGarouste invites himself to the Center Pompidou for a masterful retrospective centered on dreams and the magic of fairy tales. We recognize his mischievous characters all over the world, an elongated nose, a laughing look, a mischievous smile. The trick is played... You have entered the artist's hallucinatory world despite yourself. And here we are going to wander between his paintings and his spectacular installations, as if we were leafing through the pages of a tale for the grown-up children that we have become. A theatrical and tormented work for this brilliant artist who plays with appearances in a coup worthy of a virtuoso magician. In all, more than 120 major paintings that sum up nearly half a century of creation, in gigantic formats like here with this impressive triptych of the Banquet, designed in homage to Kafka. Here a spectacular installation dedicated to Rabelais and the parables of the Book of Proverbs which can be discovered in pieces to anyone who knows how to open their eyes. Drawing from the greatest writings in history, from Dante to the Bible via Ovid's metamorphoses,Garouste invents a unique personal mythology populated by universal references just waiting to be deciphered. . But ultimately, what strikes us here, beyond the meaning of the paintings, is this incredible ability of the one we call the intranquille to draw on grating imagery, legends and other fables to invent a new world. , making the spectator the accomplice of a vast descent into hell at the heart of an imaginary cruelly mixing dream with nightmare.

The long nose, the laughing eye and the mischievous smile... The mischievous Gérard Garouste appears here in the guise of the Italian fictional character Pinocchio for an astonishing rereading of the children's tale. A mischievous work perhaps summarizing in itself the rich and tormented universe of this virtuoso painter surrounded by flames. Welcome to the dark and disturbing, metaphorical and hallucinatory world of Gérard Garouste! The artist, a fan of uncompromising figuration since the beginning of the 1980s, once again lends himself to the game of metamorphoses by being the subject of an exhibition-event, the largest ever devoted to the painter in recent years. Through the selection of 120 major paintings, often in very large formats, and a series of installations, sculptures and graphic works signed by the hand of the master, the Center Pompidou orchestrates a long descent into hell in the Garoustian imagination, haunt of both dreams and nightmares, with delirious patterns and grating colors. Omitting nothing of his madness and his inspirations such as Dante, Cervantes or Kafka, the Parisian institution returns to the unclassifiable journey of this “intrepid” artist, one of the most important of his generation.