Clair-obscur, it’s a new exhibition in the François Pinault’s collection. A sensitive, sensory journey – one could even say, around a famous notion in painting, an intelligent journey – which allows us to see or re-see formidable works, notably the paintings of Romanian artist Victor Man, and which exceeds – this is not always the case – this sometimes slightly uncomfortable feeling that we are invited to respectfully admire a personal place, the home of an ultra-rich person who can afford, more than a public institution, the great works of their time. Let’s say that the exhibition, beyond annoyance, creates tension, in line with its title.
At the beginning, there is a quote from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, saying in essence that the contemporary person is the one who scrutinizes not the lights of his time but its darkness. Shedding light on the dark, this is a program that the exhibition proposes under the aegis of Caravaggio and Goya, who haunt the rooms like ghosts. The Spanish painter in particular is the subject of a video installation by Philippe Parreno, who films the characters in his paintings as darker nightmares than ever. We move from top to bottom through the spaces of the Bourse, supposedly from shadow to light, but obviously what strikes is how sometimes twilight is bright and conversely the black flames. Witness this video by Bill Viola that concludes the exhibition, in which large flames burn eternally in a completely dark space.
For the occasion, we have mixed contemporary works with some modern ones: from Giacometti, from Dubuffet, discoveries for me, including the Romanian painter Victor Man, born in 1974 in Cluj and apparently not much is known about him. He paints rather small figurative formats that represent faces close to skulls, strange Christs, a group of young people with faces gathered as if secretly around a cigarette and a lighter. Paintings with often macabre subjects and emitting a light that could precisely be called twilight. The rooms dedicated to him are very impressive, drawn in black, paintings very spaced out, even the windows that overlook the outside have been tinted, and one gets the impression that the only light comes precisely from the paintings.
Too Clean
The Bourse du Commerce, this large circular building next to Les Halles in the center of Paris. A place that served as a grain market for a long time, before hosting in the 19th century negotiations on the price of raw materials, a commercial vocation therefore; at least things are clear and assumed. When you enter, you quickly find yourself, and despite the exhibition route that suggests we immediately go down to the basement, below this large glass dome, on white polished concrete, a vast circular room in the middle of which a giant screen attracts our attention. It plays a film by Pierre Huyghe, self-directed and self-edited, representing a skeleton in a large desert area of Chile, gently manipulated by a black robotic system.
When I visited the exhibition, the sun was beating down on us and the video itself was all the more dazzling, creating, in view of its subject, a quite striking chiaroscuro contrast and this reflection that never left me: it’s difficult – in this luxurious, white, and grand Pinault collection, whose beauty imposes a natural and even respectful silence among the many visitors – to truly discover this darkness that Agamben talks about: because it is a place without a corner, maybe a place too clean for chiaroscuro.
