2025 Art season

Once upon a time is the theme of the International Garden Festival and also of the 2025 Art Season, bursting with works to ignite your imagination. Through symbols and metaphors, fairytales, like works of art, shine a light on profound emotions while addressing modern issues. The program invites all visitors on a journey of surprising discoveries, to think and gasp in wonder. The guest artists might not all be transmitting on the same wavelength, but each and every one of them leaves space for the invisible, for energy, and for surprise.

Sophie Zénon sets the tone. In the Donkey Stables, L’herbe aux yeux bleus tells the story of a human and artistic adventure at the frontiers of art and science, seeing the landscape as a place full of experience and life, making prints of plants, stamping tree trunks, taking photographs of flowers or bark, and reopening photographic archives.

In Le Fenil Gallery, Claire Trotignon asks us to contemplate a fabulous floating landscape, “a landscape balancing between telluric forces and delicately interwoven embroidery”. Her collages rich in architectures, vegetation and landforms, sometimes in intense blue, magnetically draw our gaze and transport us to a dreamlike island territory.

Just a few steps away, on the edge of the Agnès Varda Courtyard, La forêt qui murmure by duo G&K, Katarzyna Kot and Stéphane Guiran, is an invitation to rediscover wonder, that feeling of symbiosis with nature. Returning from the breathtaking old-growth Białowieża Forest, in Poland, the artists offer a way to connect with this living place which they see as endowed with a conscience and a capacity to interact with us.

Following the path leading to the Château, just push open the door of the Bee Barn. An extraordinary book of myths awaits us: Salomé retrouvée, Hérodiade and Orion et Cédalion. If Alquin does not sculpt trees, but rather people made from trees, it is to show that the light does not come from outside, but from within us. Food for thought.

There is more sculpture in the Historic Grounds, where you will find Les âmes sœurs by Stéphane Erouane Dumas. Driven by a singular tectonic shift, they begin their dance, rising up, simultaneously singular yet majestically parallel. Assuredly, a “totemic image of softness”. Look up, and sharp eyes will spot strange apparitions. Echoing a series of fifty drawings made using feathers from Reeves's pheasants, Olivier Leroi has positioned “things” on cedar branches to tie everything together. An owl, a mirror, or something else entirely... What do you see?

Watch out, for in the next chapter... there’s a big surprise! It awaits you beneath the Stables Canopy. Daniel Firman’s elephant balancing on its trunk is one of the most enchanting, spectacular sights you can see. And just a few steps away, Carole Solvay is defying gravity in another way. Before our eyes, she unfurls “structures” made from feathers that have been trimmed and embroidered, like cocoons from which living creatures have escaped...

After crossing the drawbridge and climbing a flight of stairs, you will arrive at Diane's Tower, which has been transformed into a living backdrop, illuminated by Monde à l’envers by Anne and Patrick Poirier. The precious object, hanging metres above the ground, shines brightly. Crystals and other pendalogues reflect the light, like a ray of hope in a sky too often covered in dark clouds.

In the Porcupine Room, the utopian, fantastical landscapes by Yann Lacroix remind us of holiday memories. Simultaneously appearing and disappearing, they trigger recollections of silent places, while remaining anchored in art history, depicting a lost paradise covered in lush vegetation.

Take another step into abundance in the Digital Gallery, home to Miguel Chevalier's Meta-Nature AI. Four paintings for four seasons, with striking visual beauty. Virtual species, shimmering with pearly iridescence, appear at random and blossom before disappearing, creating a vibrant natural world in constant rebirth.

The programme culminates with the exhibition devoted to Fabienne Verdier in the Château’s Upper Galleries. Poétique de la ligne takes us on a journey through her work, a ceaseless exploration of the line as a vehicle for universal poetry, a form of writing that can translate nature’s invisible rhythms and reconcile humans with their environment.

And to conclude this journey in art, just cross the distance that separates the Domain from its hotel. In the Bois des Chambres, Vincent Laval’s Plus loin dans la forêt awaits us, a magical hut connecting us to time, life and nature. A work that encourages us to open our eyes and change the way we look at things - a perfect summary of our Art Season.