Deserts

Close your eyes and imagine a desert. What do you picture? The Sahara, with its oases and camel caravans? Or the Arctic, with its ice floes and polar bears?

Far from the usual images we see, deserts encompass an unexpected diversity of landscapes. They represent a third of our planet’s landmass, and are present on every continent!

Thanks to large screen projections, interactives and hands-on exhibits, this first part of the exhibition Deserts immerses you in these little-known environments and attempts to answer the deceptively simple question: what is a desert?

How have humans adapted to life under the often harsh conditions of the desert? And what ties do desert dwellers still have to these environments today, at a time when traditional nomadic lifestyles are being replaced by a sedentary existence and urbanisation?

Using the objects and accounts of inhabitants of the deserts of Mali, Nunavut and Mongolia, the third part of the exhibition Deserts explores different ways of living in the desert.

Silvère Jarrosson bridges art and science through his abstract paintings, the subject of numerous exhibitions in France and abroad. His unique background, combining dance at the Opéra national de Paris, biology here at the Muséum, and the visual arts, informs his singular creative approach, which lies at the crossroads of these disciplines.

His work focuses on the genesis of forms. What is the movement, the reaction, that produces a given configuration? His work beckons us to explore a universe in the making, oscillating between the visible and the invisible.

Technically, Jarrosson has adopted his own pictorial method, playing with the fluidity of paint and the interaction between the various layers of liquid matter. His works can be seen as simulations of physical or chemical reactions, experiments within an analytical approach, offering a new perspective on natural phenomena.

Silvère Jarrosson's paintings transport us to the heart of imagination and nature, where each painting becomes, in the words of Jacques Monod, ‘a revelation’ of the hidden structures of the world around us. 

Silvère Jarrosson's exhibition is fully in keeping with the Art-Science movement, which is supported by the Muséum and which aims to promote artistic works grounded in scientific knowledge and research processes.

Jarrosson created the eight works shown here specifically for the exhibition Deserts, using an approach that is similar to scientific research.

More than mere artistic transposition, this approach embodies a collaboration between the artist and scientists Guillaume Lecointre and Maël Crépy, right down to the creative processes.

Through their dialogue, he explores the genesis of forms and the notions of chance, necessity and evolution, all while appropriating scientific methods—observation, experimentation, analysis—to create works with abstract relief, where each layer conceals or reveals a fragment of a reinvented world.

> From 2 April to 24 November 2025 – Grande Galerie de l'Évolution, Halle des Baleines, on exiting the exhibition Deserts