Biographie
Dominique Païni (born April 1947) has devoted his career to promoting cinematographic culture and exploring the aesthetics of cinema, a defining medium of the 20th century. He possesses extensive knowledge of 19th and 20th-century visual arts. In the 1980s, Païni managed arthouse cinemas in Paris, including Studio 43, Le Bonaparte, and Les Ursulines. His passion for art history led him to work at the Musée du Louvre in the late 1980s. He produced television series for a broad audience, such as Palettes and La ville Louvre, collaborating with renowned documentarians like Alain Jaubert and Nicolas Philibert.
During the 1990s, he directed the Cinémathèque française, transforming it and overseeing its relocation to the new Frank Gehry-designed building in eastern Paris in 2004. Subsequently, he became one of the directors at the Centre Pompidou, where he curated multidisciplinary exhibitions on figures like Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett, as well as programming performing arts (dance, theater), modern music, contemporary literature, philosophical and aesthetic debates, symposiums, and conferences.
Simultaneously, Païni organized internationally significant exhibitions in France, Europe, and North America, introducing innovative concepts, including:
- Hitchcock et les arts (2001)
- Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle (2003)
- Voyage(s) en utopie de Jean-Luc Godard (2006), later adapted for the Centro Cultural Oi Futuro in Rio de Janeiro (2013)
- La main numérique (France, 2008; Taiwan, 2010)
- ABC, Art Belge Contemporain (2011 at Le Fresnoy, Lille)
- Lo sguardo di Michelangelo. Antonioni e le arti (2013, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara), which traveled to Brussels (BOZAR, 2013), Paris (Cinémathèque française, 2015), and Amsterdam (Eye Film Institute, 2016)
- Le Musée imaginaire d'Henri Langlois (Cinémathèque française, 2014), celebrating Langlois's centenary
- 120 ans de cinéma. Gaumont, depuis que le cinéma existe (Cent Quatre, Paris, 2015)
In 2006, Païni was appointed head of the Fondation Maeght, where he curated a provocative exhibition exploring black as a color (Le noir est une couleur). He also co-curated an exhibition on Walt Disney’s sources of inspiration (Grand Palais, 2006) and organized an exhibition on Taiwanese artist Hsieh Chun-Te at the Venice Biennale (2011). From 2002 to 2014, he taught at the École du Louvre.
Dominique Païni has authored numerous articles in art magazines and contributed to resource books examining the interplay between cinema and other arts, including Le temps exposé, le cinéma de la salle au musée (Éd. Cahiers du Cinéma, 2002), L'attrait de l'ombre (2007), L'Attrait des nuages (2011), and Le cinéma, un art plastique (2014, Éd. Yellow Now).
