The Romans called stellae errantes the seven celestial bodies that did not follow the firmament's rotation. While the rest held their positions, these seven moved forward, stopped, and reversed by their own logic. The name was not a compliment. To wander is to move, but also to err: what does not follow the established course first appears as a flaw in the system.

Errantes, the painting that gives this exhibition its title (oil on linen, 200 × 250 cm), stages a battle. The genre, used in the Baroque to narrate conquests and establish the victors' prestige, is rendered here in a tenebrist mode, with light carving the bodies out against a dark background. Yet the figures confronting one another come from cartoons. Caricatured bodies carry the gravity of a historical scene, and the painting refuses to choose between the two registers: it holds them at the same intensity, without hierarchy between the revered and the banal.