Curator Statement :

« I’m going to publish a satanic book, full of black masses, Huysmans told him.
I want to make another one that will be white. But it is necessary for me to whiten myself.
Do you have chlorine for my soul? ».

Là-Bas,is the announcement of a journey, a sort of Way of the Cross, which for the moment is not visible. You can’t guess it. We will understand it later. It is the moment that precedes the revelation of J-K. Huysmans. This book was for him a final satanic search, a great overflowing, before his gaze is turned more precisely to other lands, other places, and his steps lead him on other paths. The trilogy of conversion has not yet begun. A few years later it will bring the new artistic and spiritual meaning of a complex life. The soul, at last, will be liberated. It is a new world that is being formed in revelation. On May 28, 1891, Father Mugnier met Huysmans. He has not read him, knows from him that he belongs to the Medan circle, knows his bad reputation and has learned that the author of À Rebours was looking for a priest. There is no revelation in Huysmans without the weariness of the time, without the disinterest, without the comfort of an elsewhere.

The intimate obsession that this friendship between Father Mugnier and the fin-de-siècle writer represents reinforces a taste for mysticism, its social functions, its cosmic dimension, its anthropological significance. But revelation is not the vain evocation of a bygone era. On the contrary, it is a re-enchantment of forms, an insatiable need to stop the gaze, to designate an object as the place of a belief, to scrutinize an effect and finally to say “I see! ». Revelation, with or without faith, is the force of extraction from the present and a desire for projection.

Théo-Mario Coppola