Biography
Dominique Païni (april 1947) has dedicated his professional life to the spread of cinematographic culture and to researches in the aesthetics of cinema, the most representative media of the 20th century. He has a deep knowledge of 19th and 20th century visual arts. During the 1980s, Dominique Païni managed arthouse cinemas in Paris (Studio 43, Le Bonaparte and Les Ursulines). His passion for art history prompted him to work at the Musée du Louvre at the end of the 1980s. He produced TV series for the general public (Palettes, La ville Louvre, etc) with famous documentary makers : Alain Jaubert, Nicolas Philibert. He was in charge of the Cinemathèque française during the 1990s, transformed it and prepared its move to its new Frank Ghery building in the East of Paris in 2004. He then became one of the directors of the Centre Pompidou : he programmed pluridisciplinary exhibitions (on Roland Barthes and Samuel Beckett), performing arts (danse, drama), modern music, contemporary literature, philosophical and aesthetical debates, symposiums and conferences. In parallel, he organised exhibitions of international scope, based on innovative concepts in France, Europe and North America :
Hitchcock et les arts(2001) Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle (2003) Voyage(s) en utopie de Jean-Luc Godard(2006) which was adapted to the Centre Culturel de Oi Futuro (Rio, 2013) La main numérique (in France in 2008 and in Taiwan in 2010) ABC, Art Belge Contemporain (2011 at the Fresnoy, Lille.) Lo sguardo di Michelangelo. Antonioni e le arti (2013, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara) which travelled to Brussels (BOZAR, 2013), Paris (Cinémathèque française, 2015) and Amsterdam (Eye Film institute, 2016) Le Musée imaginaire d'Henri Langlois (Cinémathèque française, 2014) celebrating the centenary of Langlois's birth. 120 ans de cinéma. Gaumont, depuis que le cinéma existe (Cent Quatre, Paris, 2015)
In 2006 he was appointed head of the Fondation Maeght where he organised a challenging exhibition positing black as a colour (Le noir est une couleur). He also co-curated an exhibition devoted to Walt Disney's sources of inspirations (Grand Palais, 2006) and an exhibition on the Tawainese artist Hsieh Chun-Te at the Biennale de Venise (2011). He was a teacher at the Ecole du Louvre from 2002 to 2014. Dominique Païni has written many texts in art magazines and resource books on the relationships between cinema and the other arts. (Le temps exposé, le cinéma de la salle au musée. Ed. Cahiers du Cinéma, 2002, L'attrait de l'ombre 2007, L'Attrait des nuages, 2011, Le cinéma, un art plastique, 2014, Ed. Yellow Now)
