Situated on the tip of Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Villa Kérylos was designed between 1902 and 1908 in collaboration with architect Emmanuel Pontremoli. Based on meticulous archaeological research, the house strikes a careful balancing act between past ideals and Belle Époque comforts, combining sumptuous mosaics and frescoes with electricity and plumbing, making the property an ideal stage for Leger, whose work thrives on precisely such intersections.

The exhibition opens in the entrance hall with “Ithaka”, a suspended brass curtain stamped with verses from Constantine Cavafy’s eponymous poem. Considered his most popular work, the poem, which exalts the journey over the destination, sets the tone for the exhibition as a whole. Inviting visitors to move forward with a sense of curiosity and openness, the curtain’s shimmering strips form a golden threshold that reframes the act of entering the villa.

If embossed brass grounds the immaterial through weight and solidity, Leger’s use of fabric does the same through lightness and ephemerality. In “Mnemosyne”, a Prussian blue curtain patterned with pale constellations stretches across the villa’s marble bath. Here, the celestial patterns are not printed but rather created through cyanotype using fragments of meteorite that the artist crushed and scattered on the fabric before exposure. The result is a sky made from matter that has actually fallen from space. Visitors part the fabric to reveal a copper goblet on a modest tripod inside the empty basin, referencing the Orphic mystical tradition, in which the soul, after death, must avoid drinking from the fountain of Oblivion (Lethe), and instead seek the Lake of Memory (Mnemosyne).

The same fabric reappears in “Remember”, veiling a bust of Homer, and in “Son of the Earth and of the Starry Sky”, where it is used to form a canopy that envelops the viewer. Like the brass inscriptions, these works take something elusive—starlight, memory, myth—and fix it in matter.