The City of Light has been the setting chosen for the presentation of Eva Jospin’s artistic reinterpretation of the Ruinart champagne terroir, which has its roots in the Age of Enlightenment. It is a new artistic intervention, named Promenades, on the path that leads Ruinart to celebrate, in 2029, its 300th anniversary.
They have been linked to the world of art since 1896 and that is why every year until 2029 a different work of art will be created on request. For this, contemporary artists “whose understanding of nature and climate shed light on our vision of the world” are invited. Eva Jospin has been inspired by the Champagne region and the heritage of the Ruinart house to create a sculptural landscape that has been built mainly out of cardboard, the French artist’s favorite material, although it also debuts with video.
The president of Ruinart, Frédéric Dufour, assures that they give artists carte blanche to create, although he acknowledges that they push them to do new things. In this sense, he details that “with Eva Jospin our will worked”. He has created a work with dreamlike overtones with which he “invites the viewer to take, in the form of walks, a journey into his own imagination.”
The presentation, held at the Carreau du Temple in Paris and which has even featured a special menu for the occasion by chef with three Michelin stars Arnaud Donckele that has been harmonized with great champagnes, has coincided with the celebration of International Women’s Day . And it is that Jospin is the second woman to participate in the artistic commissions of the Carte Blanche de Ruinart. The first was, in 2014, Georgia Russell. Eva Jospin’s installation takes the form of a collection of masterpieces, high reliefs, drawings, videos and embroideries that revolve around a Carmontelle, an invention from the Age of Enlightenment, a nod to the 18th century that saw the birth of the maison Ruinart.
Louis Carrogis Carmontelle was one of the precursor inventors of the magic lantern and film, creating moving bands of landscape paintings. His device consisted of a roll of paper stretched between two cylinders. Originally it contained paintings, sometimes backlit, depicting bucolic scenes populated by characters. This landscape unfolds with the turn of a small crank.
Eva Jospin has now wanted to adapt the principle to create a panorama, fusing time and space in the same perspective, remembering and discovering the historical site and terroir of the Montagne de Reims. Like the common thread that weaves the works of her artistic creation, Carmontelle goes through the different places she visited, from the chalk quarries, which she highlights as an example of reuse, to the vineyard and the nearby forest. “Juxtaposing the various layers, from the underground spaces to the aerial worlds, from the roots to the sky, her design takes up the motif of the suggestive intertwining of the branches, a subliminal link from one world to another”, explains the French artist.
Eva Jospin, who lives in Paris, creates complex and intertwined configurations and installations that seek to engage the viewer. She works with recyclable and inexpensive materials. She has now created a frieze that unfolds a story without words. It narrates the links between the underground worlds of chalk and the quarries of the impressive Gallo-Roman mines of Reims (crayères) and the vineyard, between nature and architecture, between the emblematic gestures of the artist in her studio and the elaboration of the champagne, from pruning the vines to stirring the bottles. She wanted to promote “a dialogue between the precision of the gesture and the dream”. Her installation “pays homage to intelligence hand in hand with a visionary spirit, both essential for the production of a great wine”.
From Ruinart it is stated that Eva Jospin is passionate about the richness of the Champagne region and the know-how transmitted there: from the underground world of crayères and also their conversion into cellars to the roots and intertwined vines, passing through the coronation of the kings of France in the cathedral of Reims or the ennoblement of the Ruinart family under the reign of Charles X. All this without forgetting Ruinart’s expanded commitment to biodiversity. Through a series of works of art (drawings, sculptures, videos and embroidery), Eva Jospin invites the viewer to delve into this landscape, “as if we were submerging ourselves in a mysterious story that intertwines the cycles of history and plants, life and creation.
With her work, the French artist also wants to transport the viewer to the Taissy vineyard, where Maison Ruinart is carrying out a project to support biodiversity by replanting 14,000 trees. Her cardboard high reliefs, at the same time, want to make visible the ambivalence of nature, both protective and distressing, a place of passage and confrontation”. To questions from Magazine Lifestyle, Eva Jospin affirms that “it is to be hoped that we are no longer doomed to the effects of climate change.”
During the presentation of her work, the artist explained that when she creates “I forget myself and become a tool”. And that her manual creative act is a way to escape. From Ruinart it is added that they share with Eva Jospin, daughter of the former French prime minister, the aptitude to magnify the ordinary, to promote artisan know-how working over time. And it is that Eva Jospin evokes wonderful worlds from an apparently unremarkable material such as cardboard.
In the same way, the Ruinart cellar master extracts from a simple fruit, the grape, the aromas that are chiselled to give life to a wine faithful to his vision. Time is the precious ally of their respective creations. From this historic maison of the luxury group Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy, they point out that they share with the artist “a taste for history and its transmission, the conviction that knowledge of our past sheds light on our future.”
