Messerschmidt and Artaud: Science and Nescience of the Human Face

The exhibition 'L'Ame au corps' at an unspecified venue juxtaposes Franz Xaver Messerschmidt's 'Character Heads' with five drawings by Antonin Artaud, tracing an invisible thread linking the inhabited corporeality of man through the trap of the face. Messerschmidt's heads form a disturbing circle at the articulation of 18th-century science, driven by enlightened amateurs, and 19th-century science, conducted by scholars moving toward institutional research. At the other end of the exhibition, portraits of Prevel and Pichette, along with Artaud's famous self-portrait, confirm the poet's text in which he denied the portrait as portrait and recognized only the work made on oneself. The exhibition explores the tension between scientific inquiry and the ineffable (nescience) of the human face.