Inspired by a terracotta made in Alexandria in the fourth century BC, this disturbing giant, with his face raised to the sky, defies the laws of gravity, in a simulated flight.

An artist from Rhodes, in the first century BC, imagined the giant Atlas, his body arched and straining, summons all his strength to continue, through the centuries, carrying the globe on his shoulders.

De Sphaera Mundi dives into the cosmological dream that haunts several of Bedez's works—such as Paranatellon, Magni Sidera Mundi, and Ignis Opus—presented in his previous exhibition Le Ciel nous observe (Heaven is watching us).

Twelfth-century celestial planispheres from the Theory of the Planets by Gerard of Cremona serve as pedestals for views of a comet, of high symbolic importance since associated with the space probe Rosetta, in orbit since 2014 around 67 P Churyumov-gerasimenko, to observe it and collect data on the genesis of the solar system.

In this recreated, reinvented gigantomachy based on a statue by Michelangelo, Bedez continues a fertile dialogue with the Old Masters by drawing inspiration from a subject treated by Latin poetry, Florentine sculpture of the Renaissance, and the eighteenth-century drawing.

The series of depictions of Hercules’ battles concludes with his first feat, accomplished in the cradle when he was only a small child: strangling with his bare hands two enormous, horrible snakes sent by the goddess Hera. The decor is extremely bare, a black, sinuous trace on the ground bearing the imprint of the mortal threat that Hercules’ physical strength enabled him to thwart.

In this drawing made after a Michangelo Buonarroti sculpture, Hercules holds the giant on the ground in a deadly embrace; the years have deprived the hero of his physical integrity and his weapon, without erasing the impression of power and strength consubstantial to the myth.