The fourth section of the exhibition, filled with very famous paintings, pushes the boundary of painting even further, in the artists’ constant search for an elsewhere—a boundary that is also the dream of rediscovering a lost paradise. Or at least lands, coasts, seas, and forests far from the bustle of the cities. In this sense—almost needless to say—the figure of Paul Gauguin is the one that still today perfectly embodies the longing for an elsewhere of life and color.

For this reason, the exhibition follows his path from the moment when, in 1887, together with his painter friend Charles Laval, he fled for several months—first to Panama, where he worked as a ditch digger for the canal then under construction, and then especially to Martinique. A splendid landscape from Martinique gives full meaning to this first pause of his within the purity of color. But his search for Eden would then lead him intermittently to Brittany, where he created some of his most beautiful works between 1889 and 1890, including the one featured in the exhibition.

But it is clear that Tahiti is Gauguin’s true point of arrival—the universally known one—marked by his long stays there, the first from 1891 to 1893 and the second from 1895, after returning from France, until 1901. The exhibition presents one of the absolute masterpieces of the French painter’s entire artistic trajectory, Parau Api from 1891, which arrives on exceptional loan. Echoing this extraordinary painting in the same room is Tahitian Woman from 1897, which represents Gauguin’s second, harsher period in Tahiti, as he struggled in search of the ultimate boundary.

Provence, and the Mediterranean around Antibes—thus the south of France—are other privileged places featured in the exhibition. It was therefore not necessary to travel thousands of miles across the oceans to seek one’s own boundary; it could also be found in a more familiar dimension, yet still far from the teeming cities.