The exhibition Interdit au public (No public access)

“I’m really curious about construction, about building sites. But they’re always off-limits to the public. I always get told to leave when I try to take a peek.”

“So, when the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain invited me to take photos of the construction site of its future premises on the Place du Palais-Royal, I jumped at the opportunity. For me, it was a chance to photograph the work, the different trades, to get a close look at how buildings are constructed. I wound up inside this giant enclosed vessel, shut to the outside – a sort of vast modern cavern, free of bustle, where people were working, walking around, leveling, smoothing and drilling in the calm. I was even surprised to see so many workers going about their tasks on their own, independently of the others.”

“A few mornings spent onsite didn’t lead me to grasp how buildings are constructed; in fact, from one visit to the next, it seemed like nothing had changed, but I always had new subjects to photograph. It’s all still quite mysterious to me. I let myself be drawn to the light and the color of the site, the bodies and figures inhabiting this space, the movements and flows.”

Alain Guiraudie

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and the RATP

The Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain is a private cultural institution founded in 1984 by Maison Cartier, with the mission of promoting all fields of contemporary artistic creation to international audiences, through a program of exhibitions, performing arts and conferences. A pioneer in the realm of patronage, the Fondation Cartier strives to broaden the accessibility of contemporary art for a range of audiences, exploring its manifold forms with complete independence. It offers artists from around the world a framework for inspiration and expression and a space for experimentation, as well as international visibility.

In the fall of 2025, the institution will celebrate the opening of its new site in the building that once housed the Louvre des Antiquaires, located on the Place du Palais-Royal.

Paris’s public transport system (RATP) provides a unique setting for users to encounter art. Through its many heritage- and culture-related activities, the RATP seeks to continually enhance the transport experience of its users, offering them opportunities for surprises and discoveries. The RATP’s cultural policy encompasses a wide range of art forms and expressions, with the aim of making art and culture accessible to all.

The Galerie Valois

The Galerie Valois is a former shopping gallery, which today connects the Palais-Royal - Musée du Louvre metro station on Lines 1 and 7 with the former Grands Magasins du Louvre department store in the 1st arrondissement of Paris. The gallery opened in 1919, housing window displays and stalls of goods intended to draw passers-by into the department store. The gallery’s Art Nouveau style, recognizable by its floral motifs, has made it into a landmark passage within the Parisian urban fabric. The RATP and the Fondation Cartier wanted to undertake a partnership in this heritage space, which leads to the future entrance of the latter’s new site.

Starting in April 2025, the Fondation Cartier and the RATP are thus unveiling a new project by the artist Alain Guiraudie titled Interdit au Public, in which he creates a dialogue between his work and the alcoves of the Galerie Valois.

The artist Alain Guiraudie

Born in 1964, Guiraudie grew up in Bournazel, a village in the French department of Aveyron, in a family of farmers. After high school, he studied history in Montpellier for a short time, stopping to work and write novels that remained unpublished. He made his first short film, Heroes Never Die, in 1990, followed by a second and a third. These were followed by the medium-length films Sunshine for the Poor in 2000, and That Old Dream That Moves in 2001. He has gone on to make seven feature films, including Stranger by the Lake, Staying Vertical and, most recently, Misericordia, released in October 2024.

During his year as a visiting artist at Le Fresnoy in 2017–2018, he returned to the practice of photography, exhibiting his work for the very first time at Panorama 2020. In 2023, he exhibited at Galerie Crèvecoeur in Paris, Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, and Le Consortium in Dijon as part of the biennial L’Almanach.

Guiraudie has had three novels published in France by Éditions P.O.L: Ici Commence la Nuit in 2014 (translated as Now the Night Begins, Semiotext(e), 2018), Rabalaïre in 2021 and Pour les Siècles des Siècles in 2024 (both untranslated). He is unmarried, has no children, and no longer lives in the Tarn.