The exhibition TELEMACHUS – The Quest for Self is A contemporary odyssey at the heart of lineage. It is organized by the Valmont Foundation, at Palazzo Bonvicini in Venice, from May 3 to November 22, 2025.
This spring, Palazzo Bonvicini opens the second chapter of an artistic trilogy inspired by The Odyssey byHomer. By TELEMACHUS – The Quest for Self, the Valmont Foundation offers much more than an exhibition: an immersion in the torments, the silences, the hopes and the tremors of the father-son relationship.
The ancient epic here becomes living metaphor for the quest for self, reread through the prism of contemporary art. Four artists, Jakub Flejšar, Pavel Roučka, Maxence Guillon and Didier Guillon, share the rooms of the palazzo as one shares a family memory: with respect, tension, admiration, and sometimes the urgent desire to free oneself from it.
An island genesis for a universal introspection
The exhibition takes root in a highly symbolic location: the island of Hydra, Greece. It is there, at the Villa Valentine, that the artists and curators, Luca Berta, Francesca Giubilei and Valentina Secco, came together for an immersive residency. A week of dialogue, questioning, and germination, by the sea that saw the birth of gods, heroes, and lost sons.
This Mediterranean setting, where myth surfaces in every stone, has infused every work presented in Venice. Each artist was assigned a room in the palazzo, not as a simple showcase, but as an echo chamber, resonating with the archetypes and fractures of lineage.
Emancipation, upheaval, introspection, legacy
« Now, indeed, the time has come for me too, for my part, to take my destiny to heart. »
— The Odyssey, Book II, 12
Thus symbolically opens the journey of Telemachus, and with him that of the visitor. The exhibition brings together themes of burning topicality: identity search, weight of origins, the legacy, and this uncertain line between heritage and liberation.
Flejšar & Roučka: tension, fusion, rupture
The Tandem Jakub Flejšar / Pavel Roučka embodies this filial tension with a rare plastic force. Their rooms, literally connected, compose an organic diptych. A huge red steel sculpture, a representation of the artist himself seated, crosses space, connecting, or fracturing, the worlds of the son and the father-in-law.
In the first room, the crouching figure in front of him seems crushed by the weight of a legacy that is too great. In the second, the gaze turns away, the bodies turn their backs on each other: complicity gives way to self-assertion. Roučka unfolds his own pictorial battlefield, in which Odysseus and Telemachus merge into an indistinct silhouette. The heritage becomes combat, then slow disidentification.
The Guillons: transmission, observation, transformation
With Maxence and Didier Guillon, introspection gains inner density. The father-son dialogue here takes place in a more fluid temporality, where the roles are observed, replayed, questioned. Installation The Virtuos Circle, by Maxence, traces an initiatory journey: the red carpet of the beginning becomes an arena, the lineage becomes a performance. A classical sculpture represents him as a gladiator under the silent and digital gaze of his father, spectator, judge, tutelary figure.
In the next room, Didier Guillon invokes his great-grandfather, Alphonse Lami, in the form of monumental anatomical drawings, totems of a time that spans generations. Above them, a word: dream, available in ten languages. A luminous constellation that connects ambition to memory, the past to what remains to be invented.
An intergenerational, profoundly human dialogue
What is striking in TELEMACHUS, it is the fragile balance between intimate and universalEach work speaks of a father, of a son, but touches on an experience that we all share: that of build ourselves in dialogue, or in opposition, with those who preceded us.
Through sculpture, painting, and video, each room becomes a chapter in this inner odyssey. We encounter not only Telemachus or Ulysses, but ourselves, searching, hesitating, and understanding.
A final announced, a trilogy to follow
The fifth room, enigmatic and open, announces the final part of this trilogy inspired by Homer. final song is still to be written, but already, TELEMACHUS – The Quest for Self leaves us with this question: Can we really free ourselves from what we inherit, or is that precisely what makes us unique?
Odyssey, to read or rediscover…
Ulysses and Telemachus: the echo of a father in the heart of a son
There is in The Odyssey something universal. Behind the gods, the cyclops, and the raging storms, Homer also tells us a more intimate, gentler, almost silent story: that of a father we wait for, of a son growing up without a role model, and of love that survives absence.
Telemachus, this is the child that Ulysses left behind to go to war. A son he did not see grow up. For twenty years, he was only a hazy memory, a figure evoked between the lines of a song. And yet, despite the years and the oceans, the link resistsPerhaps this is what makes this epic so touching today: this ancestral need we have to find those we have missed, to understand where we come from, and what that says about who we are becoming.
Through his journey, Telemachus seeks more than a fatherHe's looking for an image to measure himself against, a voice to respond to. He's a teenager in doubt, surrounded by the arrogance of suitors, who one day decides to leave. This departure is his, but it's also ours: that moment when we leave home, when we face the world to find ourselves, while searching for the echo of a father figure that life, sometimes, has made distant from us.
And when Ulysses finally returns, aged, disguised, unrecognizable, it is not weapons or cunning that count first, but gaze recognitionThe scene where father and son meet again is strikingly modest: nothing grandiloquent, just two men who had sought each other in silence and who suddenly recognize each other. It's fragile, it's strong. It's profoundly human.
Today, in a world where family ties are sometimes strained, reconstituted or absent, this The meeting between Ulysses and Telemachus resonates powerfullyShe reminds us that identity is also built in this dialogue, sometimes late, between generations. That the love of a father, even absent, can nourish a son's path. And that finding the other is sometimes finding oneself.
By closing The Odyssey, we understand that the real journey is not only made at sea. It is made in the hearts. Ulysses returns home, certainly, but above all, he enters his son's lifeAnd that, in our changing world, remains a victory greater than any journey.
Ema Lynnx
