Vertige · Richard Peduzzi à Orsay

At the far end of the nave of the Musée d’Orsay, Richard Peduzzi imagined a curious way to discover Paris: to view the district of the Opéra Garnier from above, before letting his gaze penetrate the building through its cutaway model. The installation dates from the museum’s opening in 1986. The Vertige exhibition places him back in the work of a production designer who, at the same time, treated architecture as one of the levers of staging.

The models for Lulu, Alban Berg’s opera staged by Patrice Chéreau in 1979, bring us back to that moment when Peduzzi was working both for the stage and for the Orsay. In the projects of his early collaborations with Chéreau, notably Le Massacre à Paris by Christopher Marlowe, tall walls, towers and ruins already assert themselves. At the scale of the model, one sees what these volumes do to space: they isolate a figure, tighten a passage, or change the distance from which one views the action. At the Opera, the model serves to prepare a production that will disappear with the end of the performances. At Orsay, it becomes itself what one comes to see.

Alongside Peduzzi’s sets and paintings, drawings chosen with him open up other perspectives. The drawing of the Temple of Neptune at Paestum by Viollet-le-Duc sits beside a project for the Petite Roquette prison and a geometric study by Gustave Eiffel. Three very different uses of architectural drawing that invite a return to the Opera’s models. From theatre to museum, Peduzzi uses the same tool: shifting the gaze to render a place legible or, conversely, to make its vertigo felt.

Practical information
- Late opening on Thursdays until 9:45 p.m.
- Closed on Mondays and on December 25.
- The museum is free on December 5 and 6 for its anniversary, with extended hours until 8 p.m. on Saturday the 5th.