Paolo Ventura, Promenades de nuit - Photodays

"Paolo Ventura, Promenades de nuit - Photodays"

from Wednesday, November 5, 2025 to Friday, November 28, 2025

Rotonde Balzac, Paris

Since 2020, Photo Days has given carte blanche to an artist each year to create a new work in the Rotonde Balzac. For the 2025 edition, Paolo Ventura has embarked on a research project focusing on the famous writer.

With Promenades de nuit, the Italian artist has created a series inspired by the author's life in Paris. Presented in this intimate and historic venue, his work creates a dialogue between fiction, memory, and architecture in a delicately fantastical setting. True to his method, Paolo Ventura begins by writing stories. His images, somewhere between dream and reality, reinvent a melancholic and timeless Paris—a Paris of deserted alleys and silhouettes crossing under streetlights. The scenes in Promenades de nuit evoke a city imbued with loneliness, nostalgia, and strangeness. They resonate with Balzac's imagination, which was also inhabited by secret figures, complex lives, and stories of light and shadow.

Exhibited within the walls of the Rotonde Balzac—a listed gem in the gardens of the Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild—this series breathes new life into a preserved space, designed as a tribute to literature and opened by the Fondation des Artistes to contemporary creation. Here, the setting becomes a stage, and photography a visual novel.