Borrowing its title from Voltaire’s philosophical tale, this journey through the Pinault Collection lists artists, generations, countries, cultures, questions, curated by Jean-Marie Gallais and in a scenography by Cécile Degos. Sweetness or irony, anguish or jubilation… Some textbook cases.
● Sigmar Polke, the post-war acrobat
Sigmar Polke, born in 1941 in Oels, Lower Silesia, now Olesnica, Poland, grew up after the war in East Germany, in Thuringia, a country he fled with his family in 1953. His first personal exhibition took place in West Berlin in 1966, at the René-Block gallery, then at Michael Werner in 1970.
Sigmar Polke, an uncontrollable artist, died in 2010, at the age of 69, in Cologne, in this Rhineland which venerates his work between anarchy and poetry, references to the history of art and sensual, almost figurative abstraction. Sigmar Polke is a tornado that crosses the painting, surprising the visitor’s gaze with his crazy freedom which mixes codes on unexpected supports, his delicacy in taming light, his suavity as a colorist, his almost schoolboy humor as a “gagman”.
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Like his compatriot Gerhard Richter, he followed, at a very young age, from 1961 to 1967, the iconoclastic teachings of Joseph Beuys. “In his works, the theme of alchemy is closely linked to the political dimension, in the continuous references to contemporaneity as well as ancient history: Sigmar Polke’s creative universe is an interrupted flow between figuration and abstraction , between references to the history of art and references to the present in the construction of a very personal, rich and multifaceted imagination”, underlined Elena Geuna and Guy Tosatto, curators of his retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi, in 2016.
“The paintings of the prolific Sigmar Polke are presented to the eye in layers, testifying to the absolute freedom of the painter in his subjects, his supports and his treatments”, admires Jean-Marie Gallais, commissioner of the Bourse de Commerce, welcoming this “ acrobat artist. “The lower part of the painting Zirkusfiguren” (“Circus Figures”, 2005) reveals that it was painted on a printed fabric with shimmering patterns,” he says. He sees the circus, a theme dear to modern art, but also Goya, engraving and popular arts.
● Marlene Dumas, the Cape Warrior
A formidable painter, in both meanings of the term, Marlene Dumas, born in 1953 in Cape Town, South Africa, has continued to fascinate since her thunderous arrival with the London collector Charles Saatchi, then on the art market : her witchy close-up of a red face, Jule-die Vrou (1985), made her in 2004 one of the three pioneers to pass the million-dollar mark. With this sharp mind who lived through apartheid and studied psychology in Amsterdam at the end of the 1970s, the body is not an abstraction, desire is wild, death is staring us in the face.
His painting imposes itself on you, embedding itself in your subconscious, coaxed by the beauty of his palette. She immediately shook up the audience at the Palazzo Grassi with “Open-end”, her magnificent retrospective, between delight and a boxing match, composed with Caroline Bourgeois in Venice, in 2022-2023. “Painting is the trace of human touch. This is the skin of a surface. A painting is not a postcard,” she says. Losing (Her Meaning), 1988, is “a work that Marlene Dumas considers pivotal, at a moment when she questions the necessity and possibility of painting the naked female body”, recalls Jean-Marie Gallais in front of this important moment of “The world as it goes”.
In 2013, the painting The Monomane of the Military Command could not be exhibited for a “Géricault” retrospective in Germany; the museum then commissioned Marlene Dumas to create a free interpretation of the painting. Here, at the Bourse de Commerce, is his Militaristic Monomaniac, 2013, in pale and menacing green.
● Jeff Koons, the guru of a new popular art
He was the king at the entrance to the Palazzo Grassi for its inauguration in 2006. The enormous sculpture rested on a podium floating on the Grand Canal. Then, he took pride of place in the atrium of the Venetian palace.
“Balloon Dog (Magenta), often considered one of the most iconic works in Jeff Koons’ Celebration series, depicts a balloon that has been twisted so that it takes the shape of a dog. Cast in mirror-polished stainless steel and painted in a transparent color, the work immediately evokes children’s birthday parties and the playfulness of early childhood. By modifying the material and dimensions of the usual inflatable balloon, Koons plays on the notions of permanence and ephemerality,” explains Elena Geuna, curator with Laurent Le Bon of “Jeff Koons Versailles,” who placed it at the center of the Salon d’ Hercules in 2008.
As “Jeff Koons: Moon Phases” took 125 miniature works by Jeff Koons aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for permanent installation near the South Pole of the lunar surface, this Balloon Dog (Magenta) that made scandal at Versailles seems child’s play. There is also on the Bourse de Commerce his Moon (Light Blue), 1995-2000. “Jeff Koons, by taking the very serious posture of a sort of guru of a new popular art, wants to promote the figure of the artist as a potential re-enchanter of the world by offering him reassuring, childish, shiny, kitsch forms,” analyzes Jean-Marie Gallais, who sees gravity surging under the mirror effect.
● Cindy Sherman, All the Faces of America
Be careful, metamorphoses! Those of Cindy Sherman multiply like so many critical faces of right-thinking America and our contemporary planet divided between fascination with luxury and attraction-repulsion for gore. This pretty woman who in the city can reach heights of New York chic is part of the risky tradition of artistic performances of the 1970s and does not hesitate to make herself look unrecognizable.
As an ugly woman with too much makeup, as an old collector clinging to her facelift, as a black woman in a society that is too white, as an unmanly man at a time when genders are becoming blurred and permeable. Each time, behind the illusion of the image, a reflection on its era and its codes. “A middle-aged woman, dressed in an elegant pink and white dress, sits in a Mediterranean landscape. The image is familiar (Cindy Sherman, Untitled
“Public expression, quasi-theatrical performance… It draws on the codes and canons of cinema, fairy tales, horror films and pornography. She critically explores the changing image of constructions of femininity and social norms imposed on women. Cindy Sherman, an acid star, a photographic monument, but a monument at risk!
● Kimsooja, living in the reflection of the mirror
“I would like to create works that are like water and air, which cannot be owned but can be shared with everyone,” says Kimsooja, born in 1957 in South Korea. His work, since the end of the 1980s, has asserted itself on the international art scene as an essential, sensitive, immaterial and universal experience.
“During the first performance that made her famous, in 1997, she crossed South Korea for eleven days, perched on a truck filled with colorful bottaris, these bundles of shimmering fabrics which accompany and punctuate the lives of Koreans from birth to ’to death, through marriage. A marginal, nomadic artist, “cosmopolitan anarchist”, in her words, she uses her own body metaphorically, like an anonymous, almost invisible presence which, through its immobility and verticality, inscribes itself like a needle in the fabric of the world, and sews it back together. with humility the flaws and the snags,” explains Emma Lavigne, general director of Pinault Collection and curator of this “Carte blanche à Kimsojaa”, from the mirror rotunda to the 24 subliminal windows that surround it.
She showed it superbly at the Center Pompidou-Metz (“To Breathe”, winter 2015-2016), throughout Poitiers (“Traversées”, winter 2019-2020), and accompanied it to the Metz cathedral (commission public stained glass windows inaugurated in September 2022). “The mirror with which she covers the floor of the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce plays a role similar to that of the needle or her own body,” says this art historian with a passion for music and dance (“Danser sa life”, with Christine Macel, in Beaubourg, in 2011).
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“The mirror replaces the body, observes and reflects the other,” explains the artist. With the use of mirrors, our gaze acts like a sewing thread that moves back and forth, entering the depths of our self and that of the other, reconnecting us to its reality and to his inner universe. A mirror is a fabric sewn by our gaze, in a movement of ebb and flow,” confided Kimsooja during her exhibition at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Étienne, in 2012. At the Bourse de Commerce, she place at the heart of a mirage, anchored between earth and sky. Sometimes a bird passes above the high glass roof and ends its flight, far away, under our feet.
● Maurizio Cattelan, ridicule as a weapon of war
Lively, elusive, mocking, charming, Maurizio Cattelan is this scathing artist who transforms existential questions and current dramas into works where humor and derision serve as vectors. He’s a secret man (Le Saut dans le vide, 2011, rare book of interviews with Catherine Grenier). Born in Padua in 1960, this slender sportsman (cycling enthusiast), who refuses the idea of repetition and the mundane daily life, is between Tati and Daumier.
Both his caricatures can be enigmatic (Turisti, 2011, his cohort of stuffed pigeons which caused a sensation at the 1997 and 2011 Venice Biennale and which hangs here on the top balcony, like a threat) or cruelly telling (Him, 2001, the face terrifying image of Hitler hidden behind his silhouette of a boy kneeling with his back to the corner of a wall, in prayer). “Faced with the excesses, troubles and paradoxes of the disoriented times in which we live, but also the incessant turbulence and explosions of current events, the works are premonitory and the artists, agitators of conscience, poets and philosophers”, analyzes Emma Lavigne .
“By turns provocative, dark and tinged with melancholy, cynical or ironic, the works presented sometimes summon the specters of history, like those of Maurizio Cattelan, Luc Tuymans, Goshka Macuga or Elaine Sturtevant, to question the world today”. Invited in 1998 to design a project for the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York, Maurizio Cattelan imagined a hydrocephalus doll bearing the likeness of the museum’s most famous artist, Pablo Picasso. This carnival figure, originally moved by a masked actor under the striped sailor top, was featured in the “Picassomania” exhibition, in 2015, at the Grand Palais. Here it opens the dark universe of the world mocked by Voltaire, “Le Monde comme il va”.
● Anne Imhof, night in broad daylight
With “Still Life”, the Anne Imhof phenomenon shook Paris in October 2021, a wise capital suddenly in a trance. Golden Lion 2017 at the Venice Biennale for her opus “Faust”, oppressive and magnetic, the German visual artist had composed, live, nine evenings at the Palais de Tokyo, hypnotic performances that the public followed like a docile crowd. An intrepid collector, François Pinault had visited with Emma Lavigne, then president of the Palais de Tokyo, this crazy labyrinth in the almost boneless architecture of the Palais de Tokyo, between tagged windows and columns swathed in black vinyl (Paddings, sculptures-accessories) like d a giant boxing ring. Or a Berlin brothel, the travelers said.
At the heart of this total (and black) work of art, the artist Eliza Douglas, muse of Balenciaga, where she embodies “the tension between the street and haute couture”, an androgynous beauty whose gender remains a mystery until she goes topless. “The horizon was the stable benchmark of illusionism since the Renaissance and the invention of Albertian perspective: it offered a vanishing point. This escape is no longer possible. Other motifs make the horizon disappear: explosion scenes, as depicted by Luc Tuymans and Anne Imhof, cataclysmic spectacles leading the eye to the edge of abstraction, in a night in broad daylight,” explains the curator. to decipher this dark chapter, “Suddenly, this overview”.
● Mohammed Sami, the other “Arabian Nights”
At first glance, the immense painting and its ocean of blues, greens, turquoise, its sparkling stars in diffuse yellow, is enchanting. “The painting One Thousand and One Nights (A Thousand and One Nights, 2022) by Mohammed Sami loses our gaze in the monumentality of its format and its textural effects. Its title evokes the magic of oriental legends of the Islamic golden age, warns Jean-Marie Gallais. However, the unusual chromatic treatment evokes another reality, which could be anti-missile defense night vision.”
Born in 1984 in Baghdad, Mohammed Sami emigrated to Sweden in 2007, before settling in London, where he studied art. His paintings often take memories in imaginary settings as their starting point. History painting is two-sided.
● Pol Taburet, the specters of rap and the Caribbean
Benjamin of the exhibition, Pol Taburet, artist from Guadeloupe born in 1997, surprises with his confidence in transposing reality into his spectral world. Like the Martinican artist Julien Creuzet, who will carry the voice of the Caribbean in the French pavilion of this 60th Venice Biennale, he imports hip-hop clips and cartoons, Caribbean voodoo and Greco-Roman mythology onto the canvas. Its large formats, smooth as enamels, have a surrealist power.
“Le Monde comme il va”, until September 2 at the Bourse de Commerce (Paris 1st). Catalog (Dilecta / Pinault Collection), €45.
