Imagina is an installation of seven flags inviting visitors to create a purely mental work of art in the street during the Venice Biennale, on the way to the festival.
Invite passers-by to create their own imaginary monochromes. The work is in the spectator’s mind. Art is a Cosa Mentale. The artwork is simply an invitation to a universal trance.
Creating a work of art in the mind, with no intermediary, no artist, no object.
Artists have only created works of art as transactional or transitional objects. Works of art are interfaces.
An invitation to reproduce a creative process. Connect with blue, connect with grey. Connect with the sky, connect with space, connect with pure colour, the colour of the spirit. Everyone is an artist, and we all need to understand that, that we can create mental works of art. Creating is a spiritual act — art is spirit. Art has no limits.
Connect with the world, with the skies of the Earth, here, far away, in space, in time. Connect with change. Connecting our inner universe to the world.
PIERRE RESTANY
Text about Le Bleu du Ciel by Stéphan Barron.
Seeing, accepting or sensing that the blue sky is watching you obviously implies a great deal of psychological involvement. You are extremely sensitive to the concept of distance and wanted to express this in your work. Distance is important because it establishes a tangible link between monochrome and the mental image of space. Sampling a small piece of grey or blue sky is infinitely less grey or blue than this perception of distance in grey or blue. This is an extremely precise reference to Yves Klein’s concept of blue impregnating consciousness and sensitivity. There’s a direct interactive phenomenon here, and the whole idea of monochrome impregnation is based on this interactive process that you describe as the interaction of the local and the planetary, and the interior and exterior. When I consider this dual interactive process, I realise that Yves Klein’s entire conceptual, theoretical, practical and demonstrative strategy was driven by the same imperative of interactivity.
You could say that your blue-grey is a sort of variation on the blue of the sky, a proportioning of grey in relation to blue, given the distance and the different climatic conditions that affect our planet’s skies. In this mix of colours that tends towards blue-grey, the passage of clouds obviously plays a decisive role. Beyond these streaks and quick marks that either modify the luminous tone of the sky or obliterate it altogether, the cloud is even more than a factor of greyness, a stimulus to desire, to the desire to travel, an invitation to travel, in other words a greater physical integration into the cosmos.
« Sono un artista francese e non parlo italiano. Vorrei organizzare un progetto artistico di strada con gli abitanti per la Biennale di Venezia nel maggio 2026. Il progetto consiste nell’appendere bandiere con il testo in diverse lingue “Immaginate un blu grigio, immaginate un grigio blu, confrontate”. Potreste aiutarmi a contattare gli abitanti per appendere queste bandiere sui loro stendibiancheria, il più spesso possibile durante il periodo della Biennale o almeno nei giorni dell’inaugurazione? Grazie mille. »