The journey of Wim Wenders in the art of others

Claudine Drai is not the most prominent contemporary French artist. Born in 1951, she nevertheless has a circle of passionate collectors. She once exhibited at Jérôme de Noirmont, at the time one of the most important galleries in Paris. His works, sculptures of crumpled paper, some having been cast in bronze, have been shown, among others, at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. They also, which is less expected, inspired a perfume, L’Heure Blanche, at the Guerlain house.

They have finally just encouraged another artist, the filmmaker Wim Wenders, to make on her Presencea thirty-five-minute film, in 3D relief, previewed during the opening week of the Venice Biennale thanks to the complicity of François Pinault and which was shown from April 22 to May 15 at the Palazzo Franchetti , where a selection of Claudine Drai’s sculptures was also shown, all transferred to the Palazzo Contarini Polignac until August 20.

Wim Wenders continues a journey in the art of others, begun with his work on Pina Bausch, which inaugurated this new technique for him, as he confided to the World Magazine in 2011 : “For twenty years, I did not think I could capture, with the classic means of cinema, the freedom of Pina’s dance, its truth too. It seemed really impossible to me and I didn’t want to disappoint her. Until I discovered 3D. I could finally pose the camera in the very space of the dancers. »

New form of dissemination

The same technology allowed him to animate the paintings of Edward Hopper, with a very short film (fourteen minutes) entitled Two or Three Things I Know About Edward Hopper. Produced on the occasion of the retrospective that the Fondation Beyeler, in Riehen, near Basel, devoted in 2020 to the American painter, it also inaugurated a new form of distribution, closer to that of contemporary art than cinemas. : the film, specified the Beyeler Foundation, which qualified it “installation”is “an edition of four, plus an artist’s proof”.

This is also the case for the one he made on Claudine Drai, even if the number of copies printed is less defined: each patron who contributed to the financing of the film received one and, as it concerns his collectors and that they are discreet, we do not know the exact number. Except that each has a unique work: they had been interviewed for the film, but their interventions had to be cut in the final cut; except in the copy that concerns them! The rest of the edition, amputated from their interventions, is intended to be sold, preferably to museum institutions. The public, therefore, only has until August 20 to see it at the Palazzo Contarini Polignac, which points to the limits of the exercise.

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