An Imaginative View of Port Royal
A Pictorial Circuit by Véronique Bigo

        23 May - 25 January 2003

        An exhibition organised by the Musée National des Granges de Port-Royal and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, with the support of the Association des Amis des Granges de Port-Royal and the association of the new urban area of Saint Quentin en Yvelines.

        This exhibition offers an unusual view of the domain and the museum of Port Royal, seen through the eyes of a contemporary artist. It explores four major themes: nature, education, religion and Pascal.

        Born in Lille in 1946, Veronique Bigo has travelled widely, and lived for many years in Rome. She now divides her time between Paris and Marseilles. Her art work was inspired first by antique works, then by contemporary artists and designers. Using a complex technique (highly diluted acrylic paint used like watercolour on sized canvas), Véronique Bigo has worked on depictions of flowers and vegetables since 1995.

        "I discovered this place when Véronique Alemany, the curator of the Musée des Granges de Port Royal, asked me to put on a show here. I was fortunate to be given a guided tour of the buildings and to be able to enter into the fascinating history of seventeenth-century France (and the centuries that built up to it), in all its political, religious, literary and artistic dimensions. I was surprised to find just how inaccessible this intensely historical site is for a neophyte and I wanted to use my art to conjure up its history through a promenade. So I designed a circuit through the site, using remaining traces and clues, and encompassing inner spaces and outdoor areas: the museum, the Petites Ecoles, the barns, the pond, the hundred steps, the abbey, the grounds, the vegetable garden, the orchard… I divided the circuit into four parts, and gave each one a theme and a colour: nature in green, education in yellow, religion in red, and Pascal in blue. Flower petals painted in trompe-l’œil on the ground, stones, wood… green, yellow, red or blue, and the paths of this promenade are punctuated by large tarpaulin-paintings printed with digital photos of my work: flowers, objects, vegetables, ink blots - a string of poetic, playful symbolic images. Inside the museum, visitors come across the master paintings of the digital images on the tarpaulins. My aim is to ARREST THE EYE, tell a story, and take time out for a moment of silence and communion along these paths strewn with clues to help visitors recognise, learn and dream." (Véronique Bigo)

        Pascal evoked by a bucket, the famous Petites Écoles by an inkblot, the majesty of nature by a cabbage… Véronique Bigo leads visitors along the paths of memory at Port Royal des Champs; she invites them to take a new sensory approach to the real world by modifying its visual dimension.

Hours
10.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m. Closed on Tuesdays

Admission
Full price 3 euros, concession 2.30 euros (friends of the museum, students)
Exhibition and abbey: full price 4.50 euros, concession 3 euros.

Access
• By road: Motorway A13, towards Chartres Rambouillet, exit at Saint Quentin en Yvelines then follow the signs to Voisins le Bretonneux. Port-Royal is 2 km south of Voisins
• By RER: line C, to Saint Quentin en Yvelines or line B to Saint Rémy Les Chevreuse