Festival Normandie Impressionniste 2026

Diana Scherer – La lumière dans les filets

29.05 – 27.09

Opening 27.05

 Saint-Nicolas Church, Caen

Normandy Impressionist 2026 – Tribute to Claude Monet

curator Philippe Platel

At Saint-Nicolas Church in Caen, Diana Scherer’s work unfolds as a singular kind of garden, one born from a collaboration between human intention and the forces of nature. Created for Normandy Impressionist 2026, and conceived as a tribute to Claude Monet, this exhibition reflects on our contemporary relationship with the plant world, poised between freedom and control, nature and artifice.

The festival theme, A Possible Garden, finds a particularly strong resonance here. Scherer’s garden is neither ornamental nor domesticated. It emerges from a slow, patient process in which roots become lines, patterns, and surfaces. Rather than shaping vegetal matter directly, the artist creates the conditions for its growth and guiding.The living organism acts, resists, negotiates. The artwork arises from this tension.

This approach echoes Monet’s own practice, for whom the garden was at once a refuge, a laboratory, and a work of art in itself. At Giverny, Monet composed a landscape that he would then paint endlessly, balancing close observation of nature with deliberate intervention. The Impressionist garden was not a wild space: it was designed and orchestrated, yet always subject to unpredictability  light, wind, seasons, time.

In Diana Scherer’s work, this ambivalence is reactivated with contemporary urgency. Her pieces materialize an in-between state: neither pure nature nor total artifice. Constrained by structures devised by the artist, roots generate forms that recall textiles and architecture as much as drawing or cartography. Installed within the sacred space of Saint-Nicolas Church, these works take on a contemplative dimension. They invite viewers to slow down, to observe what grows beyond immediate human control. This reflection resonates powerfully today, in an era marked by the over-management of the living world: artificial soils, standardized plants, controlled and optimized landscapes, often stripped of their capacity to surprise. In response to this impulse toward excessive control, the artist suggests another path one of dialogue, partial surrender, and trust in natural processes.

 

https://www.normandie-impressionniste.fr/evenement/the-light-in-the-nets/

Participating artist whose works will be featured across Normandy during the festival: