Jean-Baptiste Ganne, Untitled (All That Glitters Is Gold)

As part of the “Luce di pietra” event organized by the French Embassy at French cultural venues in Rome and curated by Henri-Claude Cousseau, Jean-Baptiste Ganne, a visual artist in residence at the French Academy in Rome, is creating an installation in the Roman cistern at the Villa Medici. One hundred thousand Italian 10-centime euro coins—an amount equivalent to the production budget allocated to the artist to create his work—spill out directly onto the floor and are covered with water. Thousands of images of Botticelli’s Venus shimmer beneath the rainwater dripping from the vaulted ceiling of the Roman cistern. Jean-Baptiste Ganne Born in 1972 in Gardanne, Jean-Baptiste Ganne lives and works in Rome. Trained—or rather, “molded”—first at the National School of Photography in Arles and then at the Villa Arson in Nice, he experiments with various forms of expression and does not hesitate to blend genres: writing, performance readings, sound installations, photography, and video. His artistic practice revolves around “the representation of the political and the politics of representation,” as seen, for example, in *Capital Illustré* (a photographic illustration of Marx’s book). His aim is to explore, more specifically, the dialectic between image and language. As a multidisciplinary artist, he is also committed to fostering encounters between artists and disciplines, as he did in 2006 during the exhibition *El alberque holandès* at La Station in Nice. He was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2003 and 2004, and a resident at the Villa Medici from 2006 to 2007. PILE (Placebo Effect). Between radical criticism of the institution and sheer frivolity, the line can seem razor-thin. To pour the supposed production budget of a work of art directly onto the ground would be to bring currency (the sign of value) to its knees, to spread it out, to immobilize it. Then to make it both the subject and the object of the piece(s). Similia similibus curantur. There is nothing closer to homeopathic therapy than the practice of art. Come this way, little social body, so I can hurt you just a bit; you’ll digest that just fine. FACE (And make way for beauty). We’ll reinterpret the whole thing as a “fountain-making”. And the multiplication of figures. Those born of waters and ancient coins. Let a hundred thousand Botticellian Venuses shimmer beneath the rain-like flows of the natural fountain that is the Roman cistern at the Villa Medici, like a hundred thousand unutterable wishes. As for whether, like a con artist, I’ll walk away with the cash, you should know that it’s the same in performance as in Hegelian philosophy: the false is a moment of the true (and vice versa). Jean-Baptiste Ganne THE BOOK Images of the installation and the artist’s text are published in the catalog edited by Skira under the direction of Marcello Smarrelli and Olivier Descotes, with photographs by Claudio Abate and Zeno Colantoni. The exhibition is presented with the support of the Nuovi Mecenati Foundation, ENEL, LVMH – Fendi, Gaz de France and Cofathec, BNL Groupe BNP Paribas, Assicurazioni Generali, Alcatel-Lucent, Air France, Osram, and La Repubblica.