Review
Avant l’orage
Februar – September 11, 2023
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
Intro
A twenty-first century Turner.
Urgency, something is burning. Just a minute and the light will be gone. Painful, ecstatic, pushing beauty.
The painting comes towards you. Reaches out with its light. Yes, painting does make you happy. Just look, be embraced by the colour carrying emotion and gesture. A human trace.
The sun, the earth, horizon, landscape, fossils; wind, waves. Implosion, explosion. Big Bang.
The exhibition Avant l’orage at Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection shows prophetic oeuvres. Addressing the current state of apocalypse, the works propose a third way, an overcoming of binaries such as nature and culture, human and non-human, darkness and light. The body seems to fuse with the objects it encounters, trying/aiming to raise an awareness that “another path is still possible.”
In the entrée, Judy Chicago and Frank Bowling present colour explosions painting a beautiful, unsettling future: Urgency, uncertainty; abstract landscapes (deserts), abstract human figures: painted women, anonymous footsteps. The protagonists by times self-absorbed, by times offensive. Rituals, both human and natural, in a state of transition. Waiting, knowing, mourning?
Rotunda
Nature is taking over. Remnants, beautifully wrapped, a DIY playground. But who will be playing? The photographs of flowers allude to nature and culture alike and form an astonishingly beautiful meeting of the two. As does Dan Vho’s installation in it’s entirety.
“You’re gonna die up there
Keep away! The sow is mine
Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me
Let Jesus fuck you! …
What an excellent day for an exorcism
Intensely
It would bring us together
You and us.”
In the words of the exhibition booklet: a green Renaissance.
Display cases
Poetic, though the term is over-exposed. Painted leaves: a school class; rotting fabric: waves and mummies; hair: a skirt, a waterfall, a flag; a golden carpet: the golden vlies. Edith Dekyndt combines (pre-)history with timelessness and suspension. There’s politics and theatre, home and commerce. These “non-works” show us: this world is so beautiful. [Mind the pathetic]
Galeries 2, 6, 7, 3 [selection]
Diana Thater’s Chernobyl (2011) could be Ukraine in 2023. I walk the ruins, wasted lands; I am in the picture. Past becomes immediate present.
The juxtaposition Cy Twombly/Daniel Steegmann-Mangrané is breathtaking, though not conceptually plausible. Light is a reasonable common ground, I guess. – Is there air in the eye of the storm?
Lucas Arruda presents a quiet room, rhythmic. Paintings like waves, gentle. A voyage for the eye. Storm, seen from a safe shelter, a forest in suspension. Sublime still.
Pierre Huyghe’s A Way in Untilled (2012-2013) is unsettling as it is captivating. Insects in close-up, Gothic sculptures, and a futurist dog. Apocalypse is calling, #propheticouevres.
Hicham Berrada’s video installation Présage (2018) is mesmerizing, uncanny, and beautiful. A non-human scene somewhere in the Mariana Trench. Pre or post, peu importe.
This exhibition comprises all media, subjects, perspectives, and interpretations. It is not before the storm; it is the storm.
Cette exposition n’est pas avant l’orage, c’est l’orage.
