Illuminations: lecture by Pascal Rousseau

About this event
The light environments which made Ann Veronica Janssens famous in the late 90s belong to a genealogy of artworks which throughout the twentieth century, have immersed viewers in a sensory ecstasy by playing with the thresholds of perception (dazzling, high frequency, etc...). Pascal Rousseau will go back to the sources of this "aesthetics of borders". He will show how this aesthetics not only establishes close links between art and the science of vision but also relates to modes of expanded knowledge (hypnosis, hallucinations, etc...) developped by the New Age movement at the turn of the century (1880-1900) and its revival during the 60's (psychedelism and Op art) to better disrupt the orderly logic of modernism.

Pascal Rousseau teaches art history at the University François Rabelais de Tours. He is a specialist of the historical avant-gardes and early abstraction, the relationships between artistic practices and the technological imaginary in contemporary culture (XIX-XXI century). The exhibitions he curated include Robert Delaunay (Georges Pompidou Center, 1999) and The Origins of Abstraction. 1800-1914 (Musée d'Orsay, 2003) and more recently Under influence. Résurgences of hypnosis in contemporary art (Museum of Fine Arts, Lausanne, 2006).