There are titles that one does not want to translate because otherwise their poetic word sound would be lost. The exhibition “La Mer imaginaire” dives beneath the foaming wave projection surface, which William Turner once painted dramatically or Caspar David Friedrich occupied with romantic melancholy, and deals with the artist's gaze into an astonishingly unknown living space. The less we know about the world below sea level and its inhabitants, the more they inspire the imagination: “La mer imaginaire” is a mysterious realm of the imagination or one that is animated by strange creatures.

Here a stuffed animal-like “killer whale with long eyelashes” by Cosima von Bonin is stranded on a school desk that is much too small and Gabriel Orozco's fantastic creatures between fish and bird made of light yellow synthetic resin float in front of the blue-ground tapestry “Polynesia, the sky” by Henri Matisse. In the real world, the oceans make up an astonishing 97 percent of the world's habitable living space. We know less about its abyssal depths - up to eleven kilometers - than we do about the surface on Mars. Ninety percent of the ocean floor, its fauna and flora, is still unexplored.

The Carmignac Foundation on the small, protected Mediterranean island of Porquerolles is an ideal place to artistically explore the imaginary beneath the surface of the sea. Even the journey, when you cast off from the port near the town of Hyères and sail over gentle waves for fifteen minutes, puts you in the mood for an odyssey. Since it opened four years ago, the corporate foundation has organized a thematic exhibition every season, which draws on its own art collection and is supplemented by loans and commissioned works.

This year, the Fondation Carmignac is also using photos by the French underwater photographer Nicolas Floc'h in a newly restored hall in the Sainte-Agathe fortification, above the island village. For his latest series, Floc'h explored the lake bed around Porquerolles. As an apnea diver, he finds his motifs in relatively easily accessible water depths. Precisely because of the fact that he photographs in black and white, his pictures of rocky landscapes and glittering, rising air bubbles or seaweeds swaying in the current have nothing exotic, but a graphic beauty. In a surprising inversion, this real seascape appears like an unknown, mysterious world.

Porquerolles is a sparsely populated idyll with one-day tourism, where you can get around from the only village on foot or by bike. The way to the Art Foundation with its annually growing and now wonderfully grown sculpture park leads through a fragrant pine forest.

Because construction has been stopped on the island, the exhibition rooms were dug into the hill as a basement under an existing villa. The skylight falls in the middle of the cross-shaped rooms through a large shallow fountain with a glass floor. When the wind ripples the water up in the pool, reflections of light flicker over the floor and walls in the halls below. There is something subaquatic about it. Bruce Nauman's monumental, in situ installed “One hundred fish fountain” provides the appropriate background noise with its deafening waterfall sound.