Exposition : Voyage - Gillet, trois générations d’artistes

For the Gillet family, Royan has been a place of meetings and holidays since Guillaume was a child in the 1920s. The landscape and light of the Royan region were important in shaping their sensitivity to the world of forms. Guillaume Gillet (1912-1987), a member of the Institut, chief architect of civil buildings and national palaces and winner of the Grand Prix de Rome, built the Notre-Dame church in Royan. Through his work and his career, he is one of the most representative architects of the Trente Glorieuses. He was also a painter and decorator. His daughter, Florence Gillet (1960), a former resident of the Académie de France in Rome and a former member of the Casa de Vélasquez, is an engraver and painter, and teaches visual arts at the École nationale supérieure d'architecture Paris-Val de Seine. Florence's son, Gaspar Dietrich (1985), is a photographer. He lives and works in the United States. "Voyage", the main theme of the exhibition at the Museum, brings the three artists together and marks a certain presence in the world. Italy, and Rome in particular, were for all three of them, at different ages, fundamental places for educating the eye and discovering landscapes, architecture and paintings. Sharing the pleasure of surprise, discovery and contemplation of the same object of admiration - landscape, painting, monument, light... - is a rare and precious experience, testifying to the same passion, that of beauty in its purity, its simplicity, its timeless and fleeting grace. The journey is also a symbol of transmission. Florence remembers her father's hand drawing. It was the black of his mother's engravings that led Gaspar to photography. The exhibition includes travel diaries, engravings and black-and-white photographs.