What happens to a painting when no one is looking at it?
By day, the museum puts every world back in its place. It names it, frames it, and keeps it still. But at night, the boundaries begin to dissolve. Frames come apart, plants spill out of the paintings and take over the space, and the audience no longer stands in front of the artworks. They step inside them.
Hidden Stories in Paintings is an immersive experience about transformation, inspired by the worlds of Henri Rousseau, Max Ernst, Frida Kahlo, and Maria Sibylla Merian. Four worlds unfold into one another, built from leaves, animals, portraits, fruit, insects, and textures drawn from the artists’ works and recomposed into a space in constant motion.
The journey begins in Henri Rousseau’s Dreamed Jungle, where vegetation grows beyond the frame. Tigers, monkeys, and birds emerge among leaves and flowers, in a landscape born from the imagination of an artist who had never actually seen a jungle. Reality becomes imagination, and imagination becomes landscape.
Gradually, the jungle changes shape. The vegetation grows denser, the textures darker, and the world transforms into Max Ernst’s Impossible Forest. Here, nothing remains just one thing: a bird becomes a branch, a branch takes on a face, a silhouette disappears into a texture. Forms are constantly shifting, opening the way into the next world.
Then come intense colors, tropical plants, animals, and fragments of portraits. We enter Frida Kahlo’s Garden of the Soul, an intimate world where body, nature, and emotion intertwine. Portraits grow among plants, hair extends into vines, branches become veins, and rupture slowly transforms into fruit, color, and life.
From this abundance, the first insects appear, and Maria Sibylla Merian’s Laboratory of Metamorphosis begins. The perspective shifts: a leaf becomes a landscape, a flower fills the entire space, and the natural world reveals itself on a monumental scale. A caterpillar becomes a chrysalis, then a butterfly. The same life, in another form.
But the journey does not end there.
The four worlds begin to meet. Rousseau’s tiger crosses into Ernst’s forest. Maria Sibylla Merian’s butterflies settle on Frida’s fruit. Plants, animals, portraits, and insects move from one world into another, until the boundaries between the artists disappear.
The frames never return.
The painting becomes space.
The plant becomes animal.
The animal becomes symbol.
Pain becomes image.
The caterpillar becomes butterfly.
Four worlds become one.
