This painting gives rise to a performance during which it is restored in public. The meticulous work of the restorer thus puts in contact the atmosphere evoked in this painting (the days of the Parisian popular uprising against Charles X in July 1830) with the effervescent climate today.
This autopsy of the painting, which focuses, among other things, on the cloud, exposes the pores of its skin to the presence of spectators—to their breath and sweat—as well as to the political and social climate and pollution. This gesture makes it possible to place something of our contemporaneity on the picture while the sediments of History look back at us. Performance subjects us to a kind of contamination that works both ways. It projects us into the illusion that a people would be summed up in a single image, while the political sensor and the environmental archive that is the painting perceives us while recording its own presence in the world.
On the occasion of the European Heritage Days, the Jeu de Paume will be accessible at the usual rates.