By Night

Organized in 1996 at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, By Night was an exhibition on the fascination and emotion exerted by night-time. It was centered on three themes: the urban night, the night sky and adventure, and the night of sleep and dreams.
The exhibition catalog brings together works from the exhibition, published in the alphabetical order of their creators’ names. This gives rise to a kind of surrealist game of exquisite corpses that produces surprisingly intense poetic effects through images unexpectedly appearing together by chance. It also reveals the great narrative and cinematographic qualities of the works. Moreover, philosopher Michel Onfray invites us to read “his” night, through a selection of texts he has chosen and classified: nights of philosophers and poets, historians and mystics.