Scuola Piccola Zattere presents the exhibition Temple of Love. Cœur, by the French artist Gaëlle Choisne (Cherbourg, 1985), that concludes the three-month residency the artist spent in Venice as part of the institution’s research program One Year Score. 

Drawing from Roland Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977), Temple of Love is a long-term project (2018 – ongoing) that develops across successive chapters. Through an approach that combines multiple media, techniques and materials, Choisne builds a progressive, evolving narrative that shapes spaces of coexistence and collaboration, hospitality and affection. 

Entitled Cœur after the eponymous entry from Barthes’ book, the new chapter introduces us to the artist’s exploration of the spiritual connection between the body and the domestic sphere. The exhibition space is reconfigured as a complex ecosystem, each room embodying a chakra, an energy point in the body corresponding both to intimate sensations as well as to collective experience. 

Choisne draws from her Haitian heritage and employs the word Lakay, meaning home in Creole language, that is depicted in Haitian naif painting as a place of encounters, of spoken words, of intimate moments both sad and joyous. The homeland of the artist’s mother, and a central reference throughout the artist's work, Haiti is the guest of honor of this project, invited through the works of eighteen Haitian painters belonging to the private collection of French writer and documentary filmmaker Jean-Marie Drot. Choisne first encountered these works during her visit to the collector’s Museum of Friendship, on the island of Ios in Greece. They depict everyday scenes of collective activities and country life that blend with allusions to the ceremonies, rituals and symbols of the voodoo religion. Amplifying the scenes, figures and forms found in the paintings, the exhibition weaves a dense, affectionate and generative dialogue with spiritual representations of life in Haiti.