Le Rêve

Throughout history, different fields of knowledge have been interested in the mysterious phenomenon of dreams, trying to penetrate its secrets, to discover its hidden meaning or function. Since ancient times, Egyptians, Greeks and Orientals have attached great importance to it and interpreted dreams, comparing them to the great collective myths and analyzing them as warnings from heaven, omens or premonitory visions.

At the end of the 19th century, many artists represented dreams as the revelation of another universe that transfigured objective reality; attempting to paint the oneiric was, for them, a way of transgressing the boundaries of art, of expanding its domain and of affirming its new powers. This ability to decipher the strangeness of the soul to form imaginary representations can be considered a metaphor for art itself.

Freud's writings, at the beginning of the 20th century, on the interpretation of dreams revealed them as the privileged way of accessing the unconscious, which links the subject to this vast imaginary domain. Psychoanalysis has allowed the knowledge of the dream considered as a surrealist rebus whose laws can be deciphered. The artists then ventured to meet their internal dialogue, their fantasies, these unknown territories, constructions of the imagination, theater of symbols, which escape the constraints of reality, to represent them.

Through the mysteries of the Marseille Game, the exhibition is an inner path, a dream.

Exhibition organized by the City of Marseille and the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais