Bain de minuit
2025
oil on wood
160 x 160 cm
This painting was created as part of a commission for the exhibition Copistes, in exceptional collaboration with the Louvre Museum, presented at the Centre Pompidou-Metz from June 14, 2025 to February 2, 2026.
The Centre Pompidou-Metz is devoting a unique exhibition to the practice of copyists. Copying is at the very heart of classical tradition: copying after the masters, learning their techniques, their canons, their narratives, absorbing their expertise, making their mastery our own—this is a path to knowledge and creation, from the most academic to the most contemporary.
Madeleine Roger-Lacan and the other artists received from the two associate curators, Donatien Grau and Chiara Parisi, the following invitation:
“Starting from the work of your choice, preserved in the collections of the Louvre Museum, imagine its copy.”
Text by Madeleine Roger-Lacan:
2015.
Nude, F. picks up the guitar lying around and caresses a few chords. I photograph his back; in the half-light a glow outlines his shoulder, and the delicate line of his stomach reflects on the soundboard of the instrument he holds tight against himself. I think of Ingres’s Bather with a Lute. What to do with this image? It slips into one of the stacks of my digital memory.
2025.
The Centre Pompidou-Metz invites me to copy a work from the Louvre.
I think of Sylvia Sleigh, who in 1973 replaced the female bodies of The Turkish Bath with six male models. When Sleigh was born in 1916, a woman had just painted a nude man for the very first time*.
* Suzanne Valadon, Adam and Eve, 1909, Paris, Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne.
Ingres painted The Turkish Bath at the end of his life. It is a retrospective painting: the back of the Valpinçon Bather, the fingers of Madame Moitessier Seated, the undulation of Angélique… This genius of collage positions his motifs within a rectangular frame that, in the course of painting, transforms into this mythical tondo. He becomes that mad chess player, modifying, shifting, adding, erasing his teeming composition.
Ingres, now it is my turn to copy you. I dig through my piles of images. Photoshop is my chessboard. F. will play the role of the bather with a guitar, C., with his head thrown back, will echo that stranded female head on the right side of the painting. The photo of E. on his unicorn float is my bather lounging in the hammam pool. This pool turns into a swimming pool in the background.
The dancer behind him? C. again, and his beautiful muscular body in motion. And that sequence of three indecently sensual women to the right of the bather? C., D., and L., all three lying down, their bodies turning and resting, vulnerable and desirable.
These are my own motifs; I take liberties with your composition, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, but it remains my matrix. That frieze of women at the back of your canvas—why not replace it with the ancient wrestling bas-reliefs I copied at the Louvre?
I remain within your frame, which tenderly encloses this saturated fantasy. Will there be a three-dimensional assemblage of these disparate images? Or will painting smooth over the temporal layers colliding in this imaginary space?
I am about to plunge into the half-light of memory. Twilight falls; desire has left the flesh and takes refuge in my brushes, my scissors, in the staging of a night where men’s bodies offer themselves and contemplate one another.
Photo Marc Domage
