La Tribune7 October 2009
Plume’s Pictures
THEY HAVE SWAPPED their feathers for a paintbrush. Cirque Plume has borrowed canvasses from the Old Masters to concoct its latest offering, ’l’Atelier du peintre’ (the Artist’s studio) which is currently showing beneath the big top in the Parc de la Villette in Paris. Velazquez and his Las Meninas, Manet and his Olympia... No-one fails to turn up. Naturally, " Musée haut, musée bas "(Museum high, museum low) by Jean-Michel Ribes is brought to mind. But, very soon the troop leaves its mark by serving up a series of tongue-in-cheek poetic pictures, some of which are funny, punctuated by zany or jerky characters recreating circus acts in the guise of a history of art, with clowns getting all muddled up and the wheel act harking back to drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. The troop even amuses itself by creating plastic works of extreme beauty thanks to an ingenious use of mirrors. In the finale, Cirque Plume reminds us what painting is all about: creating dreams.