Scenographie
For Rose, rose, rose à mes yeux, the "last exhibition" before the museum’s forthcoming renovation, a special scenography has been designed by Kris Coremans and Guy Châtel (ssa/xx architects). The scenography provides a foreground for the exhibition while referring offstage the numerous spatial incidents of the existing building. It makes it possible to show the still lifes by groups, in significant proximity to each other. This accommodates the "comparative viewing" intended by the curators.
The scenography confronts the former department store that houses Mu.ZEE with the original model of the 19th-century museum. The rough wood structure evokes the contours of a classical museum with a central hall and side galleries. The still lifes are suspended from silky poplar paneling. The tall wood structure remains visible in the upper and lower registers of the wall construction.
The central Ensor room forms something like a shrine. There the paneling is continuous, along the entire perimeter. In the galleries around it, where the decorative 19th-century practice of still life is exhibited, the wainscoting is incomplete. It is interrupted here and there to open up vistas onto the existing museum building. The room dedicated to the modernist questioning and problematization of the "still life" deviates from the conventional rectangular configuration with two oblique walls. This creates a dynamic, and leads to the Epilogue where the paintings epitomizing the dissolution of the genre resurface on the white museum walls.