Bridget Riley, Point de départ @ Musée d'Orsay

Bridget Riley, Cataract 2, 1967

This small exhibition, tucked away in an upstairs gallery at Musée d'Orsay, is a gem. I have to be honest and admit that I have never seen a solo exhibition of Bridget Riley's painting and art work, and likewise am no expert on Op Art. The good news is that my lack of knowledge meant that the exhibition was eye-opening, in more ways than one.

Bridget Riley, Straight Curve, 1963

Riley has often discussed the influence of Seurat's pointillism on her work, particularly, his ability to capture light and shadow through line, his balayé technique and the optical effects of both for the viewer. Seurat was a painter who was interested in how the viewer sees, how to create a harmonious frame through laws of colour and contrast and the ability of colour to irradiate such that the eye perceives light and shadow. The current Riley exhibition expertly demonstrates how she extrapolates his intention, does away with the representational, and elevates painting to an experience of vision through looking at abstract works. Placing some of the Musée d'Orsay's Seurat paintings, sketches, and drawings next to Riley's sketches and fully-rendered paintings was thus not only illuminating, but fully convinced of Seurat as inspiration for the British artist.

Bridget Riley, Untitled, 1979

Standing before these paintings, we quickly recognize that they anticipate us as viewers, playing with our eyes as they move. It's difficult to focus on a single spot because there are no details, just shapes that appear and disappear as we move our eyes around and over the picture plane. Riley's meticulously conceived and executed lines and shapes dance and vibrate, dancing before our eyes. Over time, it's not that something becomes revealed, but that we can no longer look, and must turn away as the painting gives us a headache. At least, this was my experience. The most sophisticated of the works on display do not even need us to move our eyes, but rather, we hold our eyes still when standing in front of a work such as Cataract 2 and the lines and curves vibrate like waves on the ocean, of their own accord. 

Installation View

As is often the case with single artist exhibitions, Bridget Riley, Point de départ offers insight into the complexity and meticulousness, the conceptual sophistication of the artist's work. But it also helped me to see Seurat's paintings from a new perspective. When looking at a painting such as Seurat's Bathers at Asnières, 1884, our attention is fully focussed on the curvature of the backs of the boys on the grass, remembering Seurat's use of white and colour and scrambled brushstrokes to create hazy limits between figure and environment. Next to Riley, Seurat's curves become fascinating, rippling from canvas to canvas, from thenineteenth century painting to the twentieth century abstraction. And when juxtaposed with the Riley paintings influenced by Seurat's The Circus, the harmony and gaity created through opposite colours becomes writ large across Seurat's painting. 

Bridget Riley, Blue Landscape, 1959

As might be expected with a Bridget Riley show, this exhibition is a treat for the eyes. Light and shadow, curves and movement create paintings that dance for us, perform for our eyes, giving us cause to remember the deceptions of vision, the fact that nothing sits still in this world. We are reminded that our eyes operate in a particular way, our retina creating the changing colours and movements, shadows where there is only colour. And maybe in the end, we will ask ourselves if we are seeing things, if things are really as they appear. All this in paintings that are intellectual, revealing, and as relevant today as they were fifty years ago. 

Tyler Mitchell @ Musée Européen de la Photographie

Tyler Mitchell, Ancestors, 2021

I was excited to see Tyler Mitchell's exhibition at the Musée Européen de la Photographie. Mitchell is a young photographer who has enjoyed a meteoric rise to renown, thanks in large part by a photograph of Beyoncé for the cover of Vogue. The work on exhibition in Paris ranges from film, through portrait photographs and landscapes, to what I will call, memory works in which he places old family photographs on mirrors. These photographs are  particularly sophisticated in their creation of reflective visions that simultaneously look back to Mitchell's own history and draw the present viewer into this history. 

Tyler Mitchell, Riverside Scene, 2021

There is a lot of staging in Mitchell's photographs: it is possible to see that he has spent a long time putting together the mise-en-scène of the image, creating carefully crafted photographs made to look realist. In particular, the portrait paintings with their curtains and backgrounds, poses and performances display the process. The people's poses are often playful and relaxed, with no sense of threat or indication of oppression or a violent history. Of course, this is the point; the figures have taken back the centre of the frame, the look at the viewer, and the narrative told by an image. They are now the protagonists of their own story where once African Americans were excluded from history. The landscape photographs are also powerful because of their appropriation of the pastoral landscape format, inserting African Americans into a space that is not, as Manet reminded us over a century ago, divorced from history as painters such as Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin would have us believe.

Tyler Mitchell, Wish This Were Real, 
Installation

Some of the most powerful photographs were those in which he uses mirrors. A man swimming in a local waterhole reflects a staged portrait of two men that hangs on an opposite wall, one sitting, the other seemingly smoothing down the backgroumnd. Next to the reflected portrait, what looks like a waterlogged object in a small black and white photograph reminds the viewer that these same waters were used for disposing of bodies and erasing traces of violence against the likes of the men in the larger photograph. The man's liberty to swim has been hard won over the course of history. In another photograph, two women, perhaps mother and daughter fix their hair in a mirror, a mantlepiece filled with old photographs of ancestors sits in the foreground. The photograph suggests that the stories of generations are woven into the daily rituals and routines in the present. Metaphorically, the photograph also reminds us that the people remembered on the mantelpiece are always in the foreground of daily life. 

Tyler Mitchell, Untitled. Blue Laundry Line, 2019

Ultimately, while I enjoyed seeing this young photographer searching for ways to represent his people with dignity, joy, and grace, the narrative was a familiar one, putting African Americans into the position so long assumed by white people. Taylor's intention is noble, but the message is not new. With his exploration of different genres, styles, and photographic techniques, the exhibition shows that Mitchell is still searching for his own visual language. The ancestor photographs were lovely, the landscapes interesting with their layers of art history, and the portrait-style works were colourful and bright. So, in short, Mitchell has a promising future, and it will be interesting to see where his aesthetic settles. 

Images copyright the artist and Gagosian

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need @ Galerie Continua

Berlinda de Bruyckere, Need, 2025

Berlinde de Bruyckere's exhibition at Galerie Continua in the Marais is an absolute must see, standing out from plethora of great exhibitions in Paris this Autumn. The work arouses a complexity of emotional and visceral responses with its raw, confrontational sensuality. Wax sculptures of legs below the knee, discoloured skin, aging toenails, cloaked in animal hide, covered in tufts of hair, placed under a bell jar, standing on an old table. A piece such as City of Refuge I (2023), like much of her work, is repulsive and fascinating, clearly fabricated, yet hauntingly real, too close for comfort, yet intimately familiar, sequestered inside a bell jar. The fleshy, disintegrating limbs, body flanks, and sculptures of branches that could also be legs, are sinewy and seductive, pulling us both closer in and forcing us, unwillingly, to step back.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, City of Refuge I (2023)

Need, the title of the exhibition itself is provocative, suggesting desire, compulsion, the craving for physical intimacy, and the repugnance of the body in all its nakedness. And yet, the sculptures are also like bodies, discovered after a long time, rotting, in the cellar after being dismembered by a serial killer. In this sense they cry danger and a ghostly presence of an unknown, but intriguing past, haunted by death. The need of an internal, living disequilibrium together with that of a death awaiting explanation, are pressed together under the bell jars. Their apparently aging plinths and tables making the forms everyday, familiar. In spite of their rich sensuousness, their provocation of much more than sight, they maintain a mystery and something never able to be explained.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need, 2025

Many of the limbs, slices of flesh, or whatever they are, are bound in string, like meat, ready to be sold, eaten, put in the oven. In this, they remind of Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox, 1655. But because they are also always on a little plinth, not hanging from meat hooks, the objects function differently. That said, while not on exhibition at Galerie Continua, de Bruyckere has made works that are hung from hooks, as if in an abattoir. But the sculptural objects on display at Galerie Continua, looking like slices of flesh, draped in an exotic fabric, again, make them something to revere, giving them a strange and rare beauty. 

Placing the "specimens" of an unknown origin under glass domes of course complicates their significance. This familiar way to display precious and delicate objects signals that they need to be protected, kept. The bell jar which traditionally maintained a controlled environment, also says that the exotic is something worth looking after. Simultaneously, on display, they draw our eye to their importance as something to be looked at, specimens under glass to be ogled. Today, the glass dome also works very well to create a shine on its surface, making the object underneath appealing, valuable, to be looked at, as if to arouse our need to consume.

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need VII, 2025

Also on exhibition in Need are a number of pieces hung on the wall, looking like wood, merged with flesh, as if the two had grown together. The objects are always in heavy old wooden frames, often with a mirrored backing, or pieces of paper stuck to the back. They reminded me of fragments found in a forest, still alive, or dead and being preserved using flesh for unknown reasons. Other pieces were titled, Plunder, Madonna, and Archangel — suggesting religious connotations, such as sacrifice and worship. 

Berlinde de Bruyckere, Need VII, 2025

Torn cloth in heavy frames likewise reminds of liturgical cloaks, resonating with the drapery around pieces of flesh. For the 2024 Venice Biennale, de Bruyckere installed an exhibition in the Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, bringing presence to the pastness and fragility of those involved in the Christian narrative. The fragility and tenderness, vulnerability and suffering of fallen trees, translated into wax by de Bruyckere are nevertheless not referring to institutional doctrine, but rather, the sculptures put human emotion and need at the centre of a religious experience. Even though the religious references are more subtle in the exhibition at Galerie Continua, the power of the emotions elicited by de Bruyckere's sculptures is similarly overwhelming.