Architecture is not an image

The Center of Contemporary Creation Olivier Debré in Tours
by the Architects Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus

A film by Daoud Bouledroua & Elke Mittmann
(24 min. / 2019)

Through an interview with the architect Manuel Aires Mateus in Lisbon, the film traces the birth and architectural design of the Centre de création contemporaine Olivier Debré in Tours. It draws a parallel with other buildings realized with his brother Francisco Aires Mateus in Portugal and Belgium.

With the support of Direction régionale des affaires culturelles Centre-Val de Loire.

CCC OD: Birth of a typeface

by André Baldinger & Toan Vu-Huu

A film by Thomas Sipp, André Baldinger & Toan Vu-Huu

(10 min. / 2017)

In 2014, the CCC OD launched a unique competition: to create a typographic character that expresses the rigour and geometric design of the building built for the new art centre. The film tells the story of the character created by André Baldinger and Toan Vu-Huu.

Exhibitions at the CCC OD:

5 films by Vincent Royer

“Les Nymphéas d’Olivier Debré”

(12 min. / 2018)

The title of the exhibition creates a symbolic link between Claude Monet’s “Water Lilies” (Nymphéas) and Olivier Debré’s large paintings. This series of six canvases, created in 1990-1991 at the request of the art centre, is presented in its entirety for the first time. The large formats, diffusing their chromatic light, create the impression of full immersion in a pictorial mental landscape. Above all the artist is interested in an infinite expanse, a sense of spaciousness that he attempts to capture and convey through monumental formats.

Ghada Amer, “Cactus painting” and “Dark Continent”

(15 min. / 2018)

A double exhibition is dedicated to the work of a key artist on the international art scene, based in New York since 2000. Ghada Amer fills the CCC OD’s black gallery with embroidered canvases, produced in a style unique to her, bringing her fame in the 1990s, brought together with her latest metal sculptures. In the nave, she has revived on a monumental scale her “Cactus Painting”, an inner garden intended as a distorted and biting reference to the great tradition of American abstract painting.

Vivien Roubaud, “Scalaire”

(11 min. / 2020)

As a contemporary sculptor, Vivien Roubaud introduces modern materials to the aesthetic sphere. For the nave of the CCC OD, he is reconfiguring a prototype that he experimented with for the first time in 2016. Several tarpaulins, superimposed in thin layers, are hanging on engines that cause them to move. It is a sculpture of the space where next-to-nothing–several tarpaulins only a few micrometres thick–can do next-to-all, embodying the emptiness–air–to give form to the intangible.

Marie-Anita Gaube, “Odyssées”

(10 min. / 2020)

At an early stage, Marie-Anita Gaube chose painting in its most figurative dimension. The artist has produced bright and colourful pictorial works depicting an invented, luxzurious and Edenic solar world. With complex compositions, plural worlds coexist in each painting, ranging between reality and illusion. The exhibition ‘Odysseys’ takes us on an exploration of these imaginary worlds.

Christodoulos Panayiotou, “The portrait of Christopher Atkins”

(10 min. / 2021)

Christodoulos Panayiotou creates an environment that responds to the spaces and architectural identity of the place. The works he brings together speak of our relationship to time, by exhuming individual or collective narratives, drawing from biographical and historical archives. It is also by revisiting the medium of painting that the artist addresses the question of the passage of time, particularly by playing with the museological protocols related to conservation and restoration.

Films © 2018, 2019, 2020 & 2021 CCC OD

Film © 2017 Thomas Sipp / André Baldinger / Toan Vu-Huu