Parcours Rousseau

"In the heart of the city there is a house. At the heart of the house is a circuit. At the centre of this circuit is Rousseau. Not the old Rousseau of dusty textbooks, not the Rousseau to fall asleep on old certainties and images: Rousseau to irritate, to think on, to dream." Martin Rueff

The “Parcours Rousseau” (Circuit of Rousseau) is an exhibition on the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the self-taught artist with a lively and deep mind. Here he is to be experienced as a musician, thinker, writer, and scholar. As a complex unattached wanderer and nature-loving exceptional talent, who placed personal freedom above almost everything else, it seems audacious to put such a person in a squat, narrow alley in the old town of Geneva. It seems almost understandable why Rousseau had every reason to break out of here. It could hardly do him and his universe of ideas justice to unfold his universal world view.

The exhibition scenography had to deal with these constricting spatial conditions and the extremely rich content. The corners and edges of the abstract installation – like Jean-Jacques Rousseau himself – resist being squeezed into the confined space. The power of freedom in thought and in physical movement in space and time shape the elements of the compressed architecture and of the pictorial worlds superimposed on it. Stations on Rousseau's life and work are presented in a coherent spatial structure. They are connected by a luminous sky. Rousseau's physical and spiritual restlessness can be experienced in the exhibition space with a wall-sized film projection of natural landscapes in different seasons slowly passing by.

To a certain extent, Rousseau inspired precisely this staging of the space. And to put it in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's words: "No matter how much you want to paint me. You will paint no one but yourself.”