At the request of the Windsor Hotel, Marcel Bataillard revisits in 2025 the series of aphorisms entitled Point de vue (“Point of View”), which he created in 2013 and which reveals itself through chance wanderings within the hotel.

This time, he installs his works in the staircases. Taking this new commission quite literally, he proposes to “quote” a famous musical step on the first and last risers of each landing, naturally making sure to mention its composer. The whole is preceded by a fermata, which in musical notation symbolizes a temporary suspension of tempo.

One of the works from the exhibition Repairing the World, Preparing the World…

Here, Nicolas Rubinstein openly lays claim to the poem Correspondances, from Les Fleurs du mal (1857) by Baudelaire, offering us an updated and contemporary interpretation in which Nature is sick and wounded.

“Nature is a temple where living pillars
Sometimes let confused words escape;
Man passes there through forests of symbols
That observe him with familiar eyes (…)”

It was at the end of her artistic residency at the Windsor Hotel, on the eve of the first COVID-19 lockdown, that the director invited Nagham Hodaifa to stay on and make use of this magical space to work and complete her series entitled Mediterranean. Despite the lack of psychological and material preparation, she managed to obtain “Arches” paper, allowing her to pursue her usual mixed-media techniques.

This series was born from her contemplation of the Mediterranean Sea, with its azure blue, as well as from the horrors this sea has witnessed over the past decade. It is dedicated to all those whose dreams came to an end there.

Nagham Hodaifa explores, at the very heart of materiality, our relationship to ourselves and to others, questioning memory, history, intimacy, the body, the in-between, as well as the issues surrounding migration and the environment.

Installation: Fireplace, Television, Books, and Ashes, Windsor Hotel Collection, 2018

*”Human beings easily wallow in contradiction, irrationality, and pretense.

At least, that is my case. I love conceptual art, which appeals more to the mind than to the senses, opposing mere visual pleasure. I also enjoy visual effects capable of creating the illusion of reality and tricking the viewer’s perception. I like to simulate intellectual positions, purely as a game rather than from conviction. The Fireplace with Books, in which books on conceptual art credibly burn, condenses all these little quirks…”*

The bar is open 24/7. An installation by Nicolas Rubinstein, Bar Barrit, will transport you into a Dumbo universe reimagined by the artist.

“As if all animal life had vanished from his hunting grounds, the artist—draped in the anachronistic finery of the “good old colonial days”—is reduced to tracking automobiles. Perhaps this is his way of claiming their virtues, qualities, and powers, much as he might once have claimed, in now bygone times, those traditionally attributed to the bear, the lion, or the eagle… His post-apocalyptic hunt, a metaphor for the tragedies endured during the century of world wars, is documented through Marc Righo’s lens in a series of photographs taken in junkyard parking lots, following either brand-new mechanical prey or those on the path to decomposition.”

Raphael Abril (Exhibition: Musée de la Chasse Safari, Safarix 2016)

New birdcage, inaugurated on May 31, 2014.

Moments of magic and mystery at night around the garden pool.

I imagined, to accompany this iconic place into the third millennium, two light monochromes that will guard the entrance, like two sculptures at the threshold of a Zen temple—a boundary between the material and the immaterial. The hotel is a place of life and encounter, and here, art is its garment of light. As Yves Klein said:
“Art is life.”
(Eric Michel, 2011)

At the request of the Windsor Hotel, Marcel Bataillard, who has long explored the figure of the blind painter, created a parcours designed for the visually impaired… and also for the hyper-sighted.

Titled Point de vue (“Point of View”), it consists of a dozen aphorisms that reveal themselves through chance wanderings. Distributed across key locations in the hotel and presented both in Braille and in hypographic form, these texts evoke, in turn or simultaneously, vision, touch, night, and image.

The charming Mickey of our childhood memories is not necessarily immutable. While the kingdom in which he lives (commercially very well) tends to confine him to a specific age range and behavior, it is not certain that a form of maturation does not occur within each of us. By virtue of his age and function, Mickey—like a barometer—should be able to record, analyze, and weigh what constitutes us, shapes us, and underpins us. He participates both in the composition of our selves, like a subtle, almost illicit ingredient within our intimacy, and in embodying what we have become.

François Bazzoli – in M le Mickey, Catalogue of the exhibition Mickey is also a rat, April 2007

Having dreamed that I was ascending to the sky, the sensation of anti-gravity fills me with exuberance.

I want all passengers to feel the elevation of their body and soul, like a NASA rocket rising into the atmosphere in pursuit of new hopes and new spaces.

The Reaction Angel, which decorates and welcomes the ascensionists, simulates, through its rocket, a boarding for “Cythera.”

The countdown—6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1—preceding the “up-lifting” prepares the guests of the Windsor Hotel for an ultra-terrestrial experience.