Michel Paysant. See Monet

From 1st Octobre 2025 to 26th January 2026, the Musée de l’Orangerie offers a new Contemporary counterpoint with the exhibition Michel Paysant. See Monet .

Michel Paysant’s work is built upon contact with science: “Making art interests me, but collaborating with fields that, a priori, have nothing to do with it, different genres, is fascinating”, he confides. Which is why he developed a type of drawing based on recordings of his eye movements.

The project, titled DALY, standing for Dessiner avec les yeux (Drawing with my Eyes), is implemented with the help of an eye tracker (an oculometric procedure that highlights eye activity, the visual path, its fixation points and movements). So the eye rather than the hand becomes the tool. Thus Michel Paysant focuses in particular on interpretation of artistic heritage, revisiting art history, “looking at” works through the filter of his own creation.

In 2022, he was overcome by a desire to draw Claude Monet’s Water Lilies with his eyes. Perhaps, first of all, because of the paradoxical nature of this ambition: to create immense paintings, characterized by their vastness, their absence of beginning and end, considered one of the first acts of decentralized painting in the West. All Over, where no part of the painting takes precedence over another. The Orangerie exhibition project Michel Paysant. See Monet is born!

The artist’s eye movements transcribe his “inner cinema”, which he provides with tangible form. Drawings on paper made with the help of a plotter, lights created from eye fixation points at the moment the artist discovers Monet’s Green Reflections panel, Paysant’s thoughts draw the work on paper and canvas, polymorphous objects where interactions between traditional techniques and high tech redefine the role of the beholder, the hand, and the artist.

The bridges I try to imagine connect art, design, craftsmanship, technique, new technologies and high tech Neither documentary nor fictional, the aim is to develop an aesthetic of dream, a vision. The digital revolution seemed to me to provide a chance to be able to connect all these fields in a common language. My English training (I’m a pure product of the Royal College of Art in London) shaped this interdisciplinary attitude. It’s the reason why I’ve evolved so freely in the hard sciences (nanotechnologies, neurosciences, etc.) and in the research projects I develop with glass-makers (in Meisenthal), ceramists and weavers (in Zimbabwe) […] An artist’s thought must go from one bank to the other. Without taboo or specialization. Art has nothing to prove. It just has to surprise us, expand the world and continue to bewilder us.

Michel Paysant