New Exhibition at the Reid Hall Caféothèque Featuring Brigitte Lannaud Levy

Until July 2026, the Reid Hall Caféothèque invites Reid Hall members to step into the contemplative world of watercolor paintings by Brigitte Lannaud Levy. The exhibition, which brings together two complementary series, "The Vintage Book Project" and "À ma fenêtre," is the latest in a series curated by Christina Chirouze Montenegro at Reid Hall. The vernissage will be held on May 30 from 4 to 7 p.m., as part of the Nuit de l'Imagination, and is open to all upon registration on Eventbrite.

Exhibition text

by Christina Chirouze Montenegro

Dreams—that territory inaccessible to understanding, which overwhelms our senses and toward which we travel each night—are still often perceived in the West as separate from our tangible reality. How greatly we underestimate our imaginative power... No sooner have our eyelids opened than consciousness severs us from that oneiric life. Fortunately, a link remains between waking and sleeping: reverie. I do not like the verb often used to describe it—"to daydream" or "to drift"—for it has too often served to scold distracted minds. And yet, what a privilege this faculty is: to extract oneself, in an instant of calm, from all that surrounds and troubles us, in order to journey toward an elsewhere that, almost without our knowing, brings a smile to our lips... The preserve of schoolchildren and prisoners alike, reverie is an inalienable part of human nature. In 2020, when humanity found itself in lockdown, it became our sole possible escape; our only power in the face of the unknown.

This repose of the gaze, this gentle removal from the here and now: such is the invitation extended to us by the works of Brigitte Lannaud Levy. At a time when our eyes are saturated with images, the artist has understood that it is words—seen and heard—that truly awaken the imagination. To read is to pronounce inwardly words capable of transporting us toward an intangible and marvelous elsewhere. Page after page, places and figures become familiar, while reading bends to our own rhythm and leaves us masters of our relationship to the narrative—to its characters, its spaces, its music. Then all it takes is a window within sight for reverie to stir: our eyes no longer fix upon anything, they simply come to rest somewhere, and already we are no longer entirely here...

Her trompe‑l'oeil portraits of paperback books—still lifes of gray matter—compose a deconstructed library in which the viewer loses themselves, sometimes in a memory of reading, sometimes in imaginative speculation. In the first case, a simple glance is enough to return us to the moment when a certain work accompanied our days, perhaps even sustained our existence: it is the reunion with an old friend, and tenderness rushes in. In the second, deprived of the back cover, we are compelled to invent the plot ourselves; we travel then through time, not toward a precise memory, but toward a childhood state in which a single image was enough to give birth to an entire story.

Playing with the palimpsest, Brigitte Lannaud Levy sometimes pairs two works, gathered from her library of old paperbacks or discovered through cherished encounters with secondhand booksellers. Assembled together, they seem to engage in a cadavre exquis, composing surrealist poems of evocative phrases: "Writing / (one's) Journal / The Cat (on one's knees) / (in the) House of Bernarda / (while) A Circus Passes / : (for) Paris is a Moveable Feast" ... Thus do we make Duras, Nin, Colette, García Lorca, Modiano, and Hemingway converse. Books themselves then become windows that play with relationships of space and time; they carry us toward a landscape that is intimately our own.

The artist began her series of windows six years ago. During lockdown, she became deeply attuned to the few remaining links between herself and the outside world: the windows of her apartment, then those of her building, through which she could still move freely. For this exhibition, these openings are brought into dialogue with her book portraits; between pages and panes, she weaves together these two complementary forms of escape, these silent passages beyond walls. In doing so, Brigitte Lannaud Levy rekindles an ancient human power—the enduring capacity to transcend both physical boundaries and the invisible confines of the mind.

Artist

Brigitte Lannaud Levy is a painter, illustrator, and author trained at the École d'Art Martenot and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. A former publisher, she has maintained a deep passion for books and authors as an inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration, including a watercolor tour of bookstores across France for the literary magazine Onlalu and Revue XXI. She is an active member of the Urban Sketchers Paris collective since 2015 and has co-authored three books on drawing from life, published by Eyrolles and Hachette. Her commitment to sharing her practice extends to social initiatives, including workshops in prison settings and with children supported by the Secours Populaire.

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The Caféothèque is open to Reid Hall cardholders Monday through Thursday from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.