“Leviathan Thot”
Ernesto Neto

Curators: Blandine Chavanne, Alice Fleury, Jean-Marc Provost

Designed around a vast and luminous central patio, the Musée des Beaux-Arts is a perfect example of the success of the 19th century museology. Traditional paintings, from prestigious Italian, French or Flemish painters, are mixed with the contemporary art collection, illustrating the various artistic movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Major figure of the Brazilian contemporary art scene, Ernesto Neto creates vast suspended sculptures, both fragile and imposing, organic and architectural, made from translucent and smooth materials, filled with sweet smelling spices. Nantes having built its wealth on the triangular trade, these aromas suddenly take on a different flavour.

In the patio, Ernesto Neto reinvents Leviathan Thot, artwork and installation commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture in 2006, and shown at the time in the Panthéon Chapel in Paris, for the “Fall Festival”. From the original Leviathan – monster out of the book of Job, from the same name – he kept its improbable eyes, its heart, its mouth, its limbs… A monumental piece, anthropomorphic and olfactory invaded the patio like a spatial entity.