Each winter, les amis de la maison rouge produces a work specifically for the foundation's patio. This year, members have chosen the artist Stéphane Thidet.
Stéphane Thidet uses paradoxes such as games and rituals, absence and doubt, disquieting familiarity and the reversal of temporal factors. His recent works explore the onset of danger as the theatre of multiple possibilities. His work suggests we consider decline not as the beginning of the end, but as an alternative existence for all that surrounds us. Immobilise, fragilise, strip back, force things to embrace a new origin; suppose their existence. Objects trapped in themselves, commonplace objects forced into a comatose state: this shift in perspective introduces an altered world and a fictionalised reading of our everyday. Beyond their formal beauty, each of Stéphane Thidet's works is a crossroads that forces the spectator into doubt,fantasy and commotion.

All is not what it seems. As modern myths, his work snares the spectator in contradictory emotions, the same emotions we might feel when confronted with man's greatest enemy, the wolf : fascination, captivation, danger. For the patio of la maison rouge, Stéphane Thidet will imagine a menagerie, like the ones we might visit in zoos. Seeing that the patio is surrounded by glass, as is a menagerie and in particular the ones that house primates, Stéphane Thidet will transpose a zoo environment inside the foundation to reveal the numerous parallels that exist between zoos and galleries, both of which exhibit. As he himself explains, beyond the scultural quality of the infrastructures placed at animals' disposal, this comparison raises notions of exhibition, amusement and the reconstruction of an (untamed?) landscape for a given purpose. It also brings to the fore the unsettling similarity between human and ape.