at the Beaux-Arts in Rennes, an exhibition to contemplate with your hands

– IS IT A VASE? – Or an elephant: lower down, it looks like a trunk. – No, there is a nose! – Oh yes, I hadn’t felt it, so it must be a crown at the top… Maybe it’s a Greek god? » At the beginning of December, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes, Cécile and Tiphaine run their hands over a work hidden behind a black curtain. It is a resin copy of kore, an Athenian marble from the 6th century BC. AD representing a young girl wearing a hat and holding an offering.

The two friends in their thirties have just started the “Prayer of Touch” visit, a journey which invites them to discover “blindly” reproductions of sculptures from Antiquity to the present day. They continue the circuit by taking turns wearing a mask over their eyes and guiding each other through the rooms. Rennes is the final stage of a tour of France, which has already stopped in Lyon, Rouen, Lille, Bordeaux and Nantes.

“This project was launched in 2016, in Montpellier, by the Fabre museum, which had the ambition to create a permanent tactile gallery like at the Louvre,” explains curator Stéphanie Bardel. From city to city, each new participant added a piece from their collections to the initial selection, namely a mask from Gabon for the Breton city.

“The challenge of this great first is accessibility. The entire exhibition is designed for the visually impaired, instead of the usual 10%,” underlines the curator. Accessibility that is intended to be “universal”. “This sensory approach aims, more broadly, to desecrate the museum to attract a public who does not know the history of art and does not dare to take the plunge. »

An immersive scenography

With 60,000 visitors in Rouen and Lille, the concept is attractive. Since the end of November, the Rennes institution has welcomed 1,000 people every weekend, particularly families. On this December morning, a few pairs of curious people come across groups of students and a group… of nannies. It must be said that the course has been enriched with a play bubble for children and a space for toddlers, who can play with balls placed in tables at their height. This is where Sarah, a smiling childminder, breastfeeds her son, Oronui, while monitoring the toddlers entrusted to her. “After taking my children, I decided to come back. What a joy to spend an hour without having to repeat: “Don’t touch anything!” My 7 and 9 year old daughters tried their hand at writing Braille and they loved it! »

An intimacy with the artist

From this almost existential decentring a deeper relationship with art can be born. Swann recognizes that the process freed her from her preconceptions about what is worth contemplating or not. “In the permanent collections, there is such a concentration of gems that we go straight to them, without even noticing what is next to them. There, we stop at works, just because they are on our path. » Cécile, for her part, is pleased to have stayed in front of each statue for a long time: “I was trying to determine the proportions of a face, the fineness of the features, the texture of the hair… I felt more the genius of the creator . » A revelation reminiscent of that of Little Prince of Saint-Exupéry: “We only see clearly with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes. »