The galleries Le Minotaure and Alain Le Gaillard, join forces with the gallery Thomas Bernard Cortex Athletico to present a three-part exhibition confronting two artists: Boris Aronson - a key figure of the Jewish avant-garde of the 1920s, one one of Broadway's most prominent theater designers, winner of eight Tony Awards - and contemporary French artist Rainier Lericolais, author of visual, sound and spatial works.

Boris Aronson (1878-1973), son of the chief rabbi of Kiev, after the obligatory passage by the heder, frequent in the years 1917-18, the workshop of the avant-garde artist Alexandra Exter known for her theatrical scenographies revolutionaries and her completely futuristic costumes from the first science fiction film Aelita (1924). Even before the First World War, he became one of the major figures of the Kultur-Lige, a movement for the emancipation of Jews by the avant-garde, carried out through editorial and theatrical activity. After stays in Berlin and Paris, Aronson moved to New York in 1923 where he was immediately hired by Unzer Theater (Notre Théâtre) in the Bronx - a small institution at the forefront of the avant-garde in the field of representation. His first achievement is a mural decorating the enclosure of the theater constituting a tribute to Marc Chagall, but also his own vision of the history of Yiddish theater. He was immediately noticed by Maurice Schwartz, manager of the Second Avenue Theater, the most famous and most popular theater in New York at the time. Aronson will work there until 1931, before being hired by Broadway where he will make a brilliant career, realizing sets, costumes and lighting for thirty-four plays and three musicals winning several times the ultimate American theatrical awards.

As for him, Rainier Lericolais - like many artists who started their careers at the end of the 20th century - is marked by the avant-garde and modernity. His personal education was marked by the discoveries he made during the exhibition Conceptual Art, a Perspective (the ARC, 1989), when he came across the cover of Laibach's Panorama album (whose aesthetic borrows from Kasimir Malevich and John Heart? Eld), or on a copy Fragments of a romantic speech by Roland Barthes bought from a bookstore for the enigmatic detail of a painting by Verrocchio printed on its cover. "Fascinated by a time he has not lived" - as Thibaut de Ruyter, the author of the catalog text sums it up - he is an amateur of old books, a collector eager for discoveries, always in search of material for his future creations. It can simply be paper cut from fashion magazines that he will use in his collages, but also specific sources, historical anecdotes, which are found subtly in his works.

The exhibition offered by the three Parisian galleries is not a tribute that Lericolais would pay to Boris Aronson, but an imaginary dialogue between these two artists, focused on three areas that are close to both of them. This is “an invitation to look at Aronson's works as if they were produced today, to observe those of Lericolais as if they dated almost 100 years. And if you decide to take the game a little further, you can also imagine that Lericolais is the author of certain Aronson drawings (and vice versa). Fussy art historians may not like this, but it will allow enthusiasts to take another look at what they think they know perfectly well. »

Like a play, or a sonata - music being a universe close to Lericolais - the exhibition takes place in three acts or rather in three movements: at Thomas Bernard's will be grouped together the structures of Lericolais (works in volume, assemblages and collages) and Aronson's theater set projects; with Alain Le Gaillard: studies for costumes of one and drawings representing characters strangely deconstructed and fragmented on the other. Finally, at Galerie Le Minotaure will resurface one of the emblematic figures of Jewish mythology, the Dibbouk, whose legend inspired and inhabited the work and spirit of the two artists. The exhibition will bring together almost a hundred works (canvases, works on paper, sculptures, mixed media) and will be accompanied by a bilingual catalog.