The exhibition LUX S.1003 334 was born in parallel with the invitation made to Christodoulos Panayiotou (born 1978 in Limassol) by the musée d’Orsay and the Festival d’Automne, for the performance "Dying on Stage". These two projects share the passage of time as a common thread.

Across a wide range of forms, including sculpture, painting, photography, found objects and installations, the work of artist Christodoulos Panayiotou unveils the narratives hidden in the material traces of history and time. For this project, he has confronted the complex inscriptions of time in the museum, in an ensemble of works conceived by and with the musée d'Orsay. Panayiotou interacts with this institution designed in and of itself to consolidate duration. As the museum of the genesis of modernity, Orsay gives its visitors the impression of having always been here; however, it only opened in 1986. It covers the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the time of the crystallisation of the museum as institution. Panayiotou's work sets in motion the relations between separate time periods and the way we build our relation to time.

The artist sojourned in the museum and worked with its teams of curators and conservators during several months. He has conceived a project that touches upon the very material of its functioning: the preservation and writing of history, and the symbolic organization of value in time. The title of the exhibition discloves an inscription on the back of Rodin's La Pensée, a masterpiece of the musée d'Orsay, for which Christodoulos Panayiotou has created a new pedestal, which keeps a mark of its exploitation, thereby placing into perspective an element of its materiality and of its potential journey.

Across dust and restoration, masterpieces of art history and unfinished works, Christodoulos Panayiotou has conceived his exhibition as a journey structured over a series of correlations. At the very heart of the contemporary canon, he stages the mechanisms and uncertainties of the passage of time, of celebrity, of history.

Text by: Musée d'Orsay