portrait of the artist as a chick

Like Nicolas Poussin, our columnist Aurélien Bellanger is a Balzacian character. The 17th century painter^e century and trembling mythological scenes appear in “the Unknown Masterpiece” and the author of “Information Theory” reveals himself in meta-Rubempré in “the Youth Museum”, written for the collection “ My night at the museum. Aurélien Bellanger therefore naturally chose to let himself be locked up in the Louvre in the middle of Poussin’s bucolic landscapes. He has set up his camp bed facing the “Four Seasons”, an excuse to revisit his own spring, his formative years. His story thus takes on the appearance of a coming-of-age novel, the different stages of which bear the title of paintings by the master.

Like Lucien de Rubempré, Bellanger, a middle-class provincial, set out to attack Paris with dreams of art and glory in his head – “Art being the full and lucid excavation of our social determinants – the only heaven for artists”. But unlike the unfortunate hero of “Lost Illusions”, he attempted this adventure with lucidity, the mini-DV camera with which he filmed this period symbolizing his hyperconsciousness…