On the resurrected Île Seguin, the monumental new art centre Large (Le Large) – helmed by curator Cecilia Alemani and designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architects RCR Arquitectes – promises to dismantle our complicated romance with the machine.
There is a particular brand of French irony in naming a colossal, 5,000-square-metre temple to contemporary art “Large”. It is a word that whispers of escape, of hoisting the mainsail and leaving the banality of the shore behind. In nautical parlance, prendre le large is to head for open water. Geographically, the name is a wink: the Île Seguin lies precisely six nautical miles from the forecourt of Notre-Dame, measured along the Seine. Yet metaphorically, the nomenclature is a gauntlet thrown down to the Parisian cultural establishment. After a century of clanging metal and assembly-line grease, this island in Boulogne-Billancourt – once the throbbing, smoky heart of the Renault empire – is reopening its gates not to manufacture automobiles, but to manufacture thought.
Opening on 17 October 2026, Large is one of the most significant new cultural projects to emerge in the Grand Paris area in recent years. It is a deliberate attempt to shift the city’s cultural gravity westward, away from the marble corridors of the 8th arrondissement and into the post-industrial sublime. Backed by Groupe Emerige and designed by the Catalan practice RCR Arquitectes – the 2017 Pritzker Prize laureates, in their first project in Paris – in collaboration with the Paris-based CALQ agency, the building is less a white cube than a rusted, cinematic instrument for viewing. Clad in weathering Corten steel and anodised aluminium, it shimmers with the patina of memory, its façade filtered through intricate mashrabiya screens that break the Seine’s glare into a soft, almost sacred light. It is a building that understands that true luxury is not polish, but texture.
To step inside is to experience a symphony of compression and release. RCR, working with CALQ, choreographs a path that moves from a 370-square-metre, 7-metre-high atrium through a monumental circulation sequence before opening into a cavernous, column-free hall of 1,000 square metres. It is architecture as respiratory exercise. The floors are finished in matte galvanised steel, dull and absorbent, the kind of surface that swallows sound and forces the visitor to slow down. It is a spatial manifesto that rejects the frenetic scrolling of modern life; one cannot consume this art with a swipe. From the terrace, the view stretches towards the Meudon hills, framing the landscape as if it were part of the collection.
But a building, however breathtaking, is merely a shell. For the inaugural exhibition, Imaginary Engine: From Masterpieces of the Collection Renault to Artists of Today, Large has secured the curatorial equivalent of a Michelin three-star chef. Cecilia Alemani, the Italian visionary who curated the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, in 2022, returns with her first major exhibition in France with a thesis that is both provocative and painfully timely: what is our relationship with the machines we build?
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Alemani, who has spent the last decade directing the High Line’s public art programme in New York, brings a distinctly international rigour to the French scene – a necessary jolt for a venue whose mission is to champion artists living and working in France. Her approach is not a nostalgic eulogy for the industrial age, nor is it a techno-utopian cheer. It is, rather, an autopsy of desire. The exhibition, presented in partnership with the Fonds Renault pour l’Art et la Culture, dissects the automobile not merely as a mode of transport, but as a political, erotic and existential object.
The curation is a masterclass in juxtaposition. Fifty works from the manufacturer’s historic collection – artefacts of the famous Recherche, Art et Industrie programme, which invited artists to work within Renault’s industrial environment from the late 1960s onwards – are placed in dialogue with 17 new commissions. Here, the kinetic violence of Jean Tinguely meets the pixelated labour critiques of Sara Sadik; the optical obsessions of Victor Vasarely confront the ghostly photography of Robert Doisneau. It is a resurrection of sorts. Several of these works have not been exhibited publicly for more than forty years, having languished in the vaults of industrial patrimony. To see Dubuffet’s raw materiality in the shadow of the very industrial world that inspired it is to feel a shiver of historical vertigo.
The exhibition navigates five chapters with the pace of a good novel. The Factory of My Thoughts excavates the archive; Motor Forces lets chaos back into the machine, with Fischli & Weiss’s deadpan humour rubbing shoulders with Bertrand Lavier’s audacious commission – a Renault Formula 1 car slathered in broad, painterly brushstrokes, as if the vehicle had driven straight through a Rothko. It is a piece of pure, elegant vandalism.
Yet the show refuses to romanticise the factory floor. In Social Bodies, the narrative turns to the immigrant labourers who powered the production line – the voices often omitted from the glossy brochures of French industrial pride. Works by Leila Alaoui and Clément Cogitore restore dignity to these trajectories, offering a necessary counterweight to the chrome-and-glass fetishism on display elsewhere. It is here that Alemani’s irony is sharpest: the car promised freedom, but it was built on the backs of the dispossessed.
Further along, Objects of Desire plunges into the libidinal energy of the automobile. Niki de Saint Phalle’s explosive femininity collides with Bianca Bondi’s haunting new commission: a Renault 12 shell left to crystallise in salt and water, frozen mid-decay like a relic from a flooded future. And in a move of brilliant cultural cross-pollination, the Ghanaian artist Paa Joe – the legendary coffin maker of the Ga tradition – has carved a coffin in the shape of a 1899 Renault Type B. It is a memento mori for the age of petrol: a reminder that every machine, no matter how powerful, is ultimately a vehicle for our own finitude.
This is an exhibition aimed squarely at the culturally curious millennial and Gen Z demographic – the generation that navigates the world with a blend of aesthetic hunger and eco-anxiety. Imaginary Engine does not lecture about sustainability; it seduces the viewer into reflection. It understands that for the UAE’s cosmopolitan set, whether in Dubai Design District or on the Seine, the conversation around mobility is no longer about horsepower, but about the architecture of survival. The presence of Théo Mercier’s sculptures or The Human Machine chapter, which questions the blurring line between human and algorithm, feels ripped from the speculative futures discussed in the lounges of the One&Only.
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Beyond the canvases and the steel, Large is positioning itself as a civic living room. The ground floor houses a bookshop run by the teams at GrandPalaisRMN, while the fourth-floor “Extra Large” coffee shop offers panoramic views that may well make it the most sought-after vantage point west of the Eiffel Tower. Constance Guisset, the designer of choice for those who appreciate soft lines and profound comfort, has imagined Le Petit Atelier, a space for children aged six to ten – a clever move that ensures the venue is woven into the fabric of family life rather than sequestered as an adult-only sanctuary.
Crucially, the barrier to entry is deliberately porous. Forty per cent of the art centre’s spaces, including the atrium and terraces, remain freely accessible without an exhibition ticket – a radical structural decision that speaks to a modern understanding of public space. Entry is free for everyone under 26, ensuring that the galleries will buzz with the energy of the next generation rather than the hushed whispers of the old guard.
As the sun sets over the Seine, casting an amber glow through the aluminium lattice, Large feels less like a new museum and more like a promise. It is a place where the ghosts of industry meet the prophets of the future. For those who curate their lives with an eye for the exceptional – who appreciate the weight of a Patek Philippe complication as much as the line of a Le Corbusier chaise – this is not merely a date for the diary. It is a call to set sail. The open water, it seems, is the only place left to think.
Imaginary Engine: From Masterpieces of the Collection Renault to Artists of Today runs from 17 October 2026 to 7 March 2027 at Large, Île Seguin, Boulogne-Billancourt.
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