Jeff Koons-Versailles is an exceptional event
which, in the course of a tour of (re)discovery of some of this venue’s better- and lesser-known locations, shows the Château of Versailles getting back in touch with the artists of its time. If there is one place where
one should dare to stage an exhibition of our day, and not some facile pastiche - the tempting and often-preferred alternative – then surely it must be Versailles.
Contemporary artistic creation makes possible a different perception of this living monument and its everchanging reality, which is in no way a fossilized model representative of a particular period – very diffi cult, indeed,
to say which period - but is the result, rather, like the rest of our national heritage, of a complex stratifi - cation process, an accumulation of successive ideas and contributions, including contemporary ones. It
contributes to breaking down somewhat the clichés attaching to this place, as refl ected in the sometimes rather conventional and narrowly focused way the space is used. The aim is to offer new insights into a site everyone thinks they know, thus revealing its contemporary complexity, its substance, the hidden depths buried beneath the familiarity.