“I don’t like museums very much” wrote Paul Valery in 1923 being deliberately provocative in the introduction to his henceforth well-known essay “The Problem of the Museum”. If it might seem risky to think that the young French artist Clémence Estève subscribes to this declaration, in the space created by the author, her exhibition in Brest nevertheless constitutes above all a poetic problemitization of what the museum is: the site of tension between the senses and the scientific, between desire, the search for aesthetic pleasure and the work of organization and conservation.

Enigmatically entitled, Les vedettes, on ne s’en sépare pas, the exposition is an invitation to voyage through representations of those iconic or anodyne artworks that punctuate our institutions and make up the representative collection with which the artist’s computer overflows. Here, there is no stylistic or historical coherence to look for. From modernism to neo-classicism by way of ancient Greece, everything goes in. As an omnipotent conservator, Clémence Estève disposes and imposes her own museum.

Fo what is at play here is the construction of an artist’s point of view. The stars from whom she does not separate herself are those which make up the basis of her relationship with forms which she offers on view. Through an installation where the scenographic elements are invented as sculptures, Clémence Estève invites the visitor to a delicate meandering in a space where categories clash, where images are as much magnified as altered, where the problem of the museum plays out.