When French business tycoon François Pinault earmarked Paris’s Île Seguin as the new home for his art collection in 2000, he offered a dose of much-needed optimism to the 11.5 hectares of desolate brownfield. Due west of the city, the site was where automobile manufacturer Renault’s flagship production facility once hummed. But when the project fell through in 2005, Pinault penned, with considerable anguish, an op-ed for Le Monde on how he had become disillusioned by bureaucratic setbacks.
Undeterred by his predecessor’s non-success, Laurent Dumas – a French collector armed with patience and significant property knowhow – decided to take on the site. The strip had been heavily polluted by decades of industrial activity and until 2009 was accessible only by two bridges (the municipality has since added three more). But as the CEO of property developer Emerige, Dumas is no stranger to the nuances of urban-regeneration projects – and this weekend, after more than 30 years since Renault’s departure, the doors finally opened on a new art institution anchoring this mini metropolis.
As Monocle exits the Metro in the Boulogne Billancourt suburb and traverses the Daydé bridge (the island is mainly pedestrianised, except for a bus service), an undulating structure of copper-coloured aluminium seems to unfurl from the river bank. Large is the first project in the French capital to be designed by Catalan firm RCR Arquitectes. It is a 5,000 sq m art centre that anchors the Pointe des Arts, the Île Seguin’s mixed-use development that also includes a cinema, hotel and food court. Downstream, a bulbous glass concert hall and recording studios are part of venue La Seine Musicale, which opened in 2017.
“The ambition is to make the Île Seguin the beating heart of Greater Paris,” says Large’s director, Paula Aisemberg. The former curator is sitting at her new desk, which appears to be almost floating; her perch overlooks the calm waters of the Seine. “We would like visitors to come here for a full day, even the whole weekend, hence we have included a hotel.” The island is currently served by Metro line 9, and a second link will be provided by line 15 from Spring 2027.
Louis Renault originally bought the site in 1919. (Prior to the industrialist’s purchase, the island was farmland, then a commercial laundry and tannery.) Though the plant that he built quickly became the largest of its kind in the country, automotive heft wasn’t the only thing that it was known for. The company began accumulating contemporary artworks in the 1930s, and by the late 1960s, it had become a driving force that connected two worlds by giving a string of artists access to surplus materials and the factory’s machinery; Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, Venezuelan artist and sculptor Jesús Rafael Soto and American painter Robert Rauschenberg were among the creatives who benefitted from the scheme.
The Renault production plant became an exhibition space, which displayed works including a chromatic mural by Argentina-born artist Julio Le Parc in its café and Hungarian-born French painter Simon Hantaï’s screen-printed Formica panels in the restaurant. “The factory became a creative laboratory,” says Aisemberg. It’s evident that the thread between the manufacturing plant, which was demolished in 2004, and the new facilities is more than just geographical.
“We felt compelled to eulogise this automotive history,” adds Aisemberg. The gallery’s first exhibition, Moteur Imaginaire (The Imaginary Engine), is devoted to the carmaker’s own collection, featuring more than 50 pieces borrowed from the Renault Fund for Art and Culture and 17 new commissions put together by New York-based Italian curator Cecilia Alemani.
On the ground floor is that same work by Le Parc, which features a gradient of colours that seem to sweep past as though in motion. There are also pieces by Jean Tinguely and French painter Jean Dubuffet. The latter’s large-scale sculpture, “Le Mur Bleu”, was created from the factory’s epoxy-resin stocks, while Tinguely’s “Pit Stop” sculpture is constructed with parts from Renault’s RE40 Formula 1 race car. “We hope that engineers who once worked here will come back and see what we’ve created,” says Aisemberg.
And so a new era has begun for the Île Seguin. But Pinault’s influence isn’t entirely invisible. For the inauguration, he loaned the island a sculpture by British artist Thomas Houseago titled “L’homme Pressé” (“The Man in a Hurry”) from his personal collection. Almost eight metres tall, the bronze-hewn figure appears to be striding forwards resolutely. It feels like a cathartic statement for a collector who recognised the potential in this place 26 years ago. If only he’d have been prepared to wait.
large-emerige.fr
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