Corps et âmes @ Bourse de Commerce / Pinault Collection

Duane Hanson, House Painter, 1984-88

It was wonderful to be back at the Bourse de Commerce in the final days of their summer show, Body and Soul. The place was teeming with visitors, in fact, I have never seen it so full on a Friday afternoon. It seems that visitors to Paris have discovered this, one of Paris's newest cultural pearls. Because of the crowds, I skipped the rotunda sound installation in which visitors sat in silence watching bowls floating on water. Instead, I followed the fascinating exhibition of Ali Cherri's sculptures in the twenty-four vitrines around the perimeter. Cherri's provocative sculptures begun from recycled archaeological finds—broken limbs, scarred bodies, decapitated heads—made for unsettling viewing. In this installation, Cherri brings the past into the present and reminds his viewer of the imbrication of spoils of war, history, and culture. 

Ali Cherri, The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), after Velázquez, 2022

Two films by African American artist Arthur Jafa were among the most powerful works in the exhibition. Downstairs Love is the Message, The Message is Death (2016) is a collage of clips showing the history of African American life in the twentieth century. Weaving together recognizeable figures in often quoted images such as Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Barack Obama —all of whom claim a message of love, tolerance, inclusivity—and footage of anonymous men, women, children being beaten, dragged along the street, and terrorized by the police. Love may well be the message, but the language of death is the only vocabulary American society knows when speaking to African Americans. Kanye West's Ultralight Beam overlays the images, successfully moving the viewer from the emotive power of cultural icons through the horror of police brutality towards African Americans. More than one person (including me) left the screening room in tears.  

Arthur Jafa, AGHDRA, (2021)

Jafa's Aghdra (2021) in the ground floor galleries was more enigmatic, but still overwhelming in a different way. Slabs of what look like broken bitumen (digitally generated) roll around where we expect to see ocean waves under a rising sun, a setting moon in a clear sky. The black sludge or magma travel towards us, threatening to envelop us, and then they rise so high in the frame that they covers the sky. From where we sit, there is no escape once the horror of this stuff threatens to bury us. The message is clear: the sea is not the same phenomenon for everyone. We think of it as a place to go for a holiday and dream and fall in love. For African Americans, the sea is the reminder of transportation and colonialism, enslavement and entrapment to the designs of a perpetrator. 

Philip Guston, Lamp, 1974

Though it was one of my favorite pieces in the exhibition, it was not clear to me how Philip Guston's Lamp, 1974 was related to the themes of body and soul, the exhibition title. While Guston's work from this period is known for its conversation on questions of racism, Lamp is more abstract, discoursing on looking and reflection in absent space. Painted in Guston's signature pinks with flecks of grey, it is a luscious painting in which brushstrokes enigmatically travel around the canvas, thus the room in which the lamp sits. Light spills out of the lamp, but there is nothing to illuminate. The lampshade with its caresses of white and grey, glimmers of peppermint green, verges into being an image on a wall. It is a painting about light in which nothing is illuminated, there is nothing to see in an empty room, thus turning the attention back on the viewer as the one who is looking and looked at. There is a curious red line drawn horizontally through the middle of the painting, like a cord. Is it a trail of blood? Or is it a definition of the wall behind the lamp. It's hard to say. 

Marlene Dumas, Horizon, 2007-2008

In the upstairs galleries, a richness of works is displayed, again with varying degrees of relevance to the title of the exhibition. Standing out for me were works by Marlene Dumas. In a more unusual work, Horizon, Dumas paints the flowers on her mother's grave and thinks of it as a portrait. As if drifting out towards the horizon at the back of the painting, the flowers are framed by the slight hint of a grave. Or perhaps they are in a vitrine, displayed for us to admire as we walk past? The work speaks to questions of death and eternity, suggesting the preservation of life in memory after death. The blue paint is complex and suggests the changing mood of the water into which her mother's memory floats. With Dumas, it's so often about death, looking, and our ultimate blindness.

Corps et âmes, Installation View
Foreground: Niki de Saint Phalle, Nana Noire, 1965

I think I am not a theme exhibition person. With my need for order and coherence, I am always looking for continuity in an exhibition, something much easier to find in an author-centered exhibition. Body and Soul had many breathtaking works—from Man Ray to Mira Schor—but as is often the case, it felt scattered. It's a little difficult to say what exactly the exhibition wanted to show about the body and soul—particularly, as you can see, some of the most impressive works were about the absence of the body. Maybe the problem was the title? If the exhibition had been called something like "Invisible Bodies," it would have made more sense.

Georg Baselitz: Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Georg Baselitz, Traumflug sex, 2025

I loved the paintings and was moved by this exhibition as what might be seen as a sort of treatise on aging, the deterioration of the body, and the associated challenges. Moreover, the interaction of Baselitz's paintings and Thaddaeus Ropac's Pantin space were enthralling. I visited the exhibition in the early evening when the shadows cast by the latticed roof of the former ironwork factory were long, and in the heat, they were strong. Falling over the enormous paintings, creating patterns as if further caging the figures in their bodies aleady trapped inside the paintings' frames, and again on the walls, the shadows became integral to the works. The vision was quite spectacular. This was further underlined by the fact that the galleries were all but empty of visitors, so I had the pleasure of being with the paintings alone.

Georg Baselitz, Idigene kunst von damals, 2025

It was only after a little research that I understood the curious exhibition title, translated from the German as, A Leg By Manet from Paris. Apparently, Manet had difficulty painting legs, though I can be forgiven for not knowing this because in the nineteenth century, legs were not exactly on display. Manet's women typically appear in long dresses and men in loose fitting pants. So the connection to Manet is not so obvious, and certainly not visible in the paintings. The title is more about Baselitz than Manet, a reference to his own difficulties with mobility. The title also speaks to Baselitz's career long fascination with feet and hands - usually misshapen in his paintings and oversized in his sculptures. It seems ironic that an artist who has constantly pulled our attention to the feet and hands of his figures should find difficulty walking in later life.

Georg Baselitz, Warum nicht zwei, 2025

Georg Baselitz, Waren die Indigenen wirklich diejenigen, 2025

Where many artists accommodate the limitations of an aging body by painting smaller, Baselitz has gone bigger and included the traces of his negotiation of bigger canvases in the paintings themselves. Legs and mobility (or lack of it) are a major theme in these works that include the tracks left by his wheelchair as he skirts around in the painting process. There are also footprints, drips, smudges and other traces of movement as graffiti over the huge canvases. Accompanying the traces of process, misshapen, withering bodies are tenderly painted with Baselitz's familiar sensuous treatment of paint. The colour is usually fleshy, the body in the signature Baselitz upside down pose. And even though there are usually two bodies in the painting—his own and that of his wife—they rarely touch or interact. This sense of isolation is again familiar from decades of Baselitz's painting, but it feels central to the experience of aging as it is shown here.

Georg Baselitz, Verscheiden von den anderen, 2024

Over the years, I have read many critiques of Baselitz's work on the basis of his apparent misogyny. While he may well denigrate women, there is nothing in these paintings to support this. His aesthetic is one that reflects the human inevitability; we see the body falling, sleeping, in pain. Trapped by the frame, trapped within the body, the self is fragile in a whole new way now that Baseltiz is concerned with age. These are not visions of a self in which the ego is so fragile that it cannot reveal the vulnerability of being human. To my eyes, these paintings have little to do with gender or sexuality. If anything, the fragility of the aging male artist is humble and vulnerable. Self-obsessed maybe, but cruel to women? I don't see that in these paintings.

Georg Baselitz: Ein Bein von Manet aus Paris
Installation View, Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Another critique often leveled at Baselitz's work is that the upside down figures are a gimmick that he has exploited for commercial and art world attention. It is true that he paints them over and over again, but here, the motif is not without motivation. The upside down body and supine bodies speak to its destabilization and incapacitation with age. Where bifurcation was once of Germany, in this exhibition, the doubled Baselitz paintings represent himself and his wife. In one painting, the two figures look as though they could be lying in their coffins - the body not simply withered, but dead. Together. Again, they might be bifurcated, but the meaning of the twin figures has shifted and is not without deeper relevance.

Robert Irwin @ White Cube, Paris

Installation View, White Cube, Paris

My first encounter with the light sculptures of American artist Robert Irwin in the early 1990s was a revelation. I remember walking into a Soho gallery and being mesmerized by the interaction of fluorescent light and scrims for the first time, recognizing the concerns of painting extended beyond the four sides of a framed canvas. The predominantly white light, at times broken by red tape, at others by metal obstructions, changing intensity and hue depending on where I stood in the gallery, the angle through which I was placed in relation to the scrims. The work resonated so strongly with Mondrian, with hazy photographs, and the blur of Monet's vision. I immediately saw Irwin's installations as modernist painting in light. 

Robert Irwin, Legacy #3, 2012

Together with artists such as James Turrell and Dan Flavin, Irwin not only invented a new kind of experiential light art, but they expanded our conceptions of light, colour, and their interactions with space of a gallery. By extension, these works brought new dimension to our understanding of our perception as viewers. No longer was light used to illuminate a thing in the world or an object on a canvas, but for these artists, light was the thing itself. Light took on a material, became the subject of the art work. Light didn't simply stand in for someone as it did for Caravaggio in The Calling of Saint Matthew—light became the medium and meaning of the work.

Robert Irwin, Basie's Basement, 2015

Irwin does something a little different from Turrell and Flavin because his primary motivation is not to create spaces through light, although that eventuates. His concern is more about how light is used and manipulated to shift the ways that we see.  In this exhibition at White Cube, Paris, some of Irwin's last  works, fluorescent light sculptures are vertically attached to walls, some turned on, others masked with vertical strips of tape, interrupting, but also creating colour fields in which diverse colours come into dynamic rhythms of communication, shifting as we move around the space. Natural light floods through the gallery windows on the first floor of a Parisian building, prompting us to reflect on its interaction with the artificial, the illusions created through looking. And as we move around, we realize that there is an absence of a fixed single place from which to stand to observe the truth of what we see when colours mutate. The interactions of light, both clashing and in concert, dance and vibrate as vigorously as the world around us. 

Robert Irwin, #6 x 8", 2015

The gallery flyer tells of a connection between Irwin's work and abstract expressionism because Irwin began as an abstract expressionist. Of course, we immediately see the push to create colour as subject, but for me, the strongest connection to painting is to the pop art of someone such as Roy Lichtenstein. Lichtenstein painted brushstrokes that reduced the use of paint to the process and subject of the work. The brushstroke is not in the service of depicting something else, it's the thing, the work of art itself. We could say that Irwin is doing the same with light. Light no longer creates meaning of something, it is the meaning of the artwork for Irwin. While Lichtenstein pokes fun at the supposed authenticity of the abstract expressionist aesthetic, Irwin pushes art outside of the abstract expressionist frame altogether.  He moves away from a focus on an expression from the unconscious to a reflection on the viewer's physical experience of seeing in space. For this innovative use of fluorescent light, Irwin was a unique artist who has left his mark.

Boros Collection Bunker Berlin

Bunker on Reinhardtstrasse

Despite several attempts to visit this space in the past couple of years, last week was my first time inside the Bunker Berlin. Housed in a former Nazi bomb shelter, subsequently converted into a prisoner of war camp by the Soviets and then a techno warehouse night club in the 1990s, the bunker is somehow illustrative of the ever-evolving transformation of Berlin. And no less telling of Berlin as the self-made city of the 2000s, the building was purchased by an advertising executive in 2003 and fashioned into one of the coolest art spaces in town. When Hitler had the bunker built, there wasn't time or money to dig underground, and so the building went upwards. Thick, heavy walls, no windows, one entrance, but the "bunker" would withstand a bomb. In keeping with the aspirations of all Nazi buildings, envisioned for the roof was a statue of the triumphant German soldier. Today, the owner of the building has his penthouse perched atop the bunker; it is somehow in keeping with our times that the capitalist marks his status as the hero of contemporary Germany by placing his abode atop the bunker. Those who have seen Tár (dir. Todd Field, 2022) will be familiar with the interior of the penthouse, itself mimicking the aesthetic of the one time air raid shelter. 

Bunker before renovations

A visit to the Boros collection—the advertising executive's private art collection—is an event, a production showcasing contemporary art. We buy a ticket for the privilege to become acquainted with a wealthy person's private collection, not a public musuem. A guided tour is the only way to visit the collection. Somehow, I had the feeling that if visitors were allowed to visit the Boros collection on an individual basis and the building was not so shrouded in history, the art would not be such a big drawcard for the average tourist. But for a look inside the building, visitors are happy to pay the relatively high entrance fee. It is also worth mentioning that the guide who led my tour was very knowledgeable and made the often highly conceptual art accessible to all. The bunker itself has been sanitized in the renovations, retaining the surface of the old walls, but none of the grime and grease of its former uses. The comparison would be the Pinault Collection in the restored Bourse de Commerce in Paris. But whereas Pinault brings works from outside into the exhibitions and installations, he lends work, and has a living breathing collection, Boros is amassing a private collection sealed within the bunker.

Adrian Morris, Filtration Plant, 1974

The art ranges in quality. I will say that much of it seems to have been bought with the space in mind as most of the work is sympathetic to the walls. Though Boros has collected work by a number of well known artists, his acquisition policy is one of buying works in the year that they are made. This results in a lot of contemporary art by artists who are emerging or in the early stages of their careers. That in itself is an admirable policy, but it does mean that the work can be uneven. While some of the work is radical and boundary breaking, other pieces had little resonance.

Anna Uddenberg, Rona's Revenge, 2020

Among the best of the often highly conceptual works on display were Anna Uddenberg's sculptures of women who contort their bodies to get the perfect selfie of their perfect butts. Decked out in BDSM gear, the figures are both fabulous and frightening in their simultaneous subsumption and critique of female identity, usually sexually defined. I was also impressed by Berenice Olmedo's display of mechatronic orthoses (acquired from her onetime work place) on strings, like puppets, dancing, until they fail and fall to the ground. When the orthoses falls, we immediately reflect with empathy on the absent wearer's attempts to walk. While other of Olmedo's work might challenge ableist notions of performance, her works on display in Bunker Berlin are about the resilience and resolve of those who once wore the orthoses.

Berenice Olmedo, Julieta, 2021

Also in the collection were a handful of paintings by a little known British artist, Adrian Morris. Morris's paintings were intriguing on a number of levels, navigating questions of space and looking at space from different angles. Spaces and landscape are seen through windows that appear to be in motion the longer we look at the works. The views from planes and trains or through unidentifiable windows at ambiguous spaces spoke of the shifting meanings of space and our continual reorientation dependent on the time and lens for looking. Morris's work represents the exception to Boros's commitment to buying in the year of execution, and is a welcome addition to the walls of the Berlin Bunker with its current identity as home to a private art colleciton. 

Andreas Gursky, Paris, Montparnasse II, 2025 @ Gagosian

Andreas Gursky, Montparnasse II, 2025

From every angle, Andreas Gursky's new work, Montparnasse II,  is stunning. The large photograph is now on exhibition at Gagosians small gallery space in rue Castiglione, first seen on approach through the large street window. Walking through the arcade, passers by are able to peer through the window and, from a distance, see through to the windows in Montparnasse II. Inside the gallery, it is difficult not to be pulled into the orbit of the world inside the building, even though we cannot see inside. We remain at a distance from the apartments through the windows, no matter how close to the photograph we step. This is the first arresting realization about Montparnasse II: we are looking at a mise-en-abime of windows. Windows within a window of the photograph, itself able to be seen through the window of the gallery. 

Installation View @ 9 rue de Catiglione

Immediately, I was reminded of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, as we, the viewer take the place of Jeffries with his telescope, straining to peer inside the windows on the other side of the street. In Gursky's windows we see a man sitting at a desk, his hand on chin, a woman sitting at her table. I am mesmerized by books on the sill, arrangements of flowers, a doll's house and stuffed toys, photographs, CDs, a lamp, a radio able to be seen in different windows. Each window tells of the individuality of a person, no matter the conformity of the modernist building they inhabit. Some of the most beautiful spaces—or windows—are covered with a curtain, blue, green, purple, pink, cotton, velvet, and plain white blinds. Other windows are like abstract paintings as reflections are caught on the window creating a soft pattern of moving shapes. Still others are blackened out completely, as though we are in the movie theatre waiting for the film to begin.

Andreas Gursky, Montparnasse II, 2025

When I wasn't imagining that I was looking through Jeffries' telescope, I could have been looking at a film strip, or a photograph contact sheet of thumbnails, some frames similar to others, but every one different. Again, I was reminded that even if everyone has the same-sized window, even if they live in the uniform Immeuble d'habitation Maine-Montparnasse in the rue Commandant-Mouchotte, there is nothing instrumentalized about everyday life. The functional building designed by Jean Dubuisson is a characteristic French postwar mass housing solution, built from 1959 to 1964 at a time when housing was in high demand. To me, the photograph shows that the human will always be in tension with the systematic organization of the built environment.

Gursky in the making of Montparnasse II

Like many of Gursky's photographs, Montparnasse II raises questions about the reality of the image. We believe what we see to exist, even though we know it can't be real. Here the original building has lost its drabness and uniformity, clouds removed, the length impossible for a camera lens to capture. Like, and very different from the first iteration of Montparnasse (1993), Montparnasse II  is a composite manipulated photograph, made from approximately one thousand photographs, taken from eight different positions along a terrace on opposite buildings. Curtains have been coloured, windows retouched, the sky brushed out. Thus, over time, recognizing that I am looking at an aestheticized image, I started to wonder. Behind all the excitement of seeing Gursky's brilliant work in which he pushes photography technology to its limits, there are a number of darker questions lurking inside these windows.

Andreas Gursky, Montparnasse, 1993

Whose apartment am I looking inside? Did Gursky obtain permission or is he, and am I, a voyeur? Turning peoples' lives into objects? I start to wonder who lives in the building? How many of the occupants have changed since the 1993 photograph? How much is the rent? Is it subsidized? And as is my number one question when it comes to all Paris buildings: are the walls thick or thin? How noisy is it on the inside? What is the reality of life inside this building that I am looking at? These details of daily life are hidden from the viewer of the large glossy print because the building is veiled in the beauty of Gursky's photographic genius. 

There is also the question of time passing: technology is now more sophisticated than it was in 1993. The image is more precise, the developing techniques more sophisticated. Gursky emphasizes thie element of the work, it is a temporal project, functioning in history, and yet, we see it only as a spatial depiction. The most interesting time passing comes as I strain to see inside the windows, voyeuristically, even though I am frustrated, and there is little to see. This is the time across which the narrative of Gursky's photograph is written—my inability to look into the depth of other people's lives from behind windows inside windows, framed by a photograph.

Imi Knoebel, etcetera @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Imi Knoebel, 

The website blurb for Imi Knoebel's etcetera at Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery doesn't offer many ways into the exhibition. It says that his "abstract art investigates the fundamentals of painting and sculpture through an exploration of form, colour and material. [Knoebel's] aim is to uncover the basic material elements of art, which he locates in the simple interactions between humans and the essential conditions of our world." Isn't this what every abstract painter does? And couldn't we say this about any number of abstract works? It seems such a generic and ungenerous way to describe Knoebel's abstraction. Because, in these paintings, he is doing something quite unique. 

Imi Knoebel, CIII (2024)

Knoebel paints on metal most of the time, creating a surface that is fast, transparent and, in many cases, luminous. The literature references Malevich, but the artist whose work most resonated in my mind as I wandered the three floors of this exhibition was Ellsworth Kelly. Knoebel may have little interest in Kelly's work, but these energetic works are, at times, exploring some of the same parameters of painting. Knoebel's paintings challenge perception and our trust in what we see, in how we see and, much of the time, this is achieved through colour. At a distance from works in the main gallery, they shift in size and shape depending on where we stand. The edges of the metal support appears to weft and warp, squares becoming trapezoids, quadrilaterals with non-parallel sides. Up close, I tried to decipher the exact shape of the support, often in vain. That said, there are works for which the aluminium has obvious non-parallel sides, even if, from some angles, they appear as square.

Imi Knoebel, LXIV (2023)

The markings are also unique in that they are somewhere between expressionist swipes and graffiti markings. There are a lot of lines and strokes, swiping of different colours together as the brush is swept down or across the support. The transparency of paint comes from these very quick strokes, sometimes making shapes, at others, remaining lines. Unlike a lot of abstract painting, it is almost impossible to see something familiar in the surface markings of Knoebel's. Rather, in a more modernist tradition - perhaps more reminiscent of Philip Guston than Malevich - we see the shapes moving, vibrating, shifting to demarcate foreground and background, left and right of the picture plane. We also see negotiations between figure and ground, as if in a search for balance on the canvas. Strokes become explorations of space as it is drawn thanks to the restlessness of our vision. 

Imi Knoebel, XXXV (2023)

In the absoluteness of their abstraction, we see Knoebel's pictures engaged in questions of structure, how and where to place the line within the four (uneven) sides of a support. Similarly, in the sliding of paint up and down, around, creating shapes, there is an interrogation of what is a brushstroke. At least, he asks, what is its purpose? Where does it begin and end? Is it used to define or to shade? Sometimes the line looks like it might be hieroglyphic, a secret language telling stories for the initiated only. At other times, there is something resembling art brut about the lines, childlike scribbles on paper. And in still other paintings, the graffiti-like language screams a confused expressionism. 

Imi Knoebel, XXXVI (2023)

Not only is Knoebel doing something unique in his paintings, but the works are also diverse. Some are pretty, others harsh, others exploratory. Each has a different tone, depending on the colour and shape, direction, purpose of the line. In the upstairs gallery, smaller works on paper started to resemble indeterminate spaces, rooms, with objects—furniture for example—inside. All of which is to say, I was pleasantly surprised at the freshness of these paintings, to see them embracing so many different languages of abstraction, speaking to different moments in the history of painted abstraction. They are doing a lot more than is claimed in the publicity, making a rewarding visit.

Dans le Flou. une autre vision de l’art de 1945 à nos jours @ Orangerie

This exhibition includes many great individual works, but as an exhibition, it goes in many different directions. It also tends to stay on the surface of the many different, and otherwise rich debates around the blur and indistinct. Inspired by, or more accurately, set in motion by Monet's Water Lillies — because it's the Orangerie, the connection must be made — the exhibition sections move from Monet's blindness, through postwar disillusionment with the precision of modernity, the unrepresentability of the Holocaust, the deception of media and technology, and the uncertainty of abstract expressionism, to the "mistakes" of amateur photography, the blur/screen/hazy/disintegrating image can be connected to a whole lot of motivations in the twentieth and early twenty-first century.

Gerhard Richter, Blumen, 1994, CR 815-3

To be sure, as I say, there are some magnificent works in the exhibition. As a Richter fan, I was happy to see a range of his paintings as they are surely central to any exhibition considering blurring and indistinction. Richter's Flowers prompted thought of another theme that could have been added, that of death. Spirits, ghosts, the other worldly and their depiction thanks to photography are a noticeable absence here. The representation of the unseen in the 20th century was inspired by the invention of photography, and it could have been placed as a fulcrum or springboard to cohere the exhibition. As it was, there was a distinct lack of context and comprised a lot of images that shared this element of haziness.

Vincent Dulom, Hommage à Monet, 2024

Some of the individual rooms worked very well. A room called "At the Frontier of the Visible" with works by Vincent Dulom, (Hommage à Monet, 2024), Ugo Rondinone (No. 42 Vierzehnterjanuarneunzehnhundertdreiundneunzig, 1996), Wojciech Fangor (N 17, 1963) was particularly compelling. In this room, the spectator is confronted with the deceptions of the eye. We think of our eyes as seeing things as they are, reality as it is, and yet, as we look at these paintings, they move, shift, vibrate, disappear. In front of these works, we are reminded that vision is as unstable as the world we are looking at. At the same time, each of these works makes a claim for the idea of paint as itself an apparition, something that floats on the surface of a canvas before disappearing. 

Philippe Cognée, Métamorphose I, 2011

If visitors are able to enjoy the exhibition for individual works, Philippe Cognée's Métamorphose I, 2011, is an absorbing and complex work. A large encaustic painting of high rise buildings that Cognée proceeds to go over with a hot iron. The wax melts and with it, the buildings collapse. In a section together with Richter's September 2005, and Thomas Ruff's jpeg ny01.2004, both of which represent smoke pouring out of the World Trade Centre towers, Cognée's painting takes on sinister meaning. Not only does he represent the cities metamorphosing and growing, but the melted wax shows the building and rebuilding of the urbanscape is a destructive measure. 

Gus van Sant, Elephant, 2003

The exhibition closes with a display of fragments from famous films that include some version of the blurry, out of focus, or indistinct. Again, there is no context for the very different examples shown, from Gus van Sant's Elephant (2003) to Hong Sang-Soo's In Water, 2023. Given the centrality of technological images to the notion of the blur, it would have been nice to see more integrity given to these few films by, for example, drawing attention to or at the very least, describing, the very different uses of the blur for these films. All in all, the exhibition is slim on intellectual substance and rich on images, making it disappointing in some ways and a treat in others. 

Lucas Arruda Qu'importe le paysage @ Musée d'Orsay

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

It was a treat to visit Lucas Arruda's exhibition, Qu'importe le paysage, with my friend Janise, a painter. Painters always give me a whole new perspective on art, often noticing details that escape my critical eye. And what I learnt looking through Janise's eyes is just how daring it is to make such obvious references to the icons of the past. Arruda's references are multiple and range over centuries, from Romanticism (both British and German) through Monet to Rothko. And yet, his paintings are like none of the above. Still, he has the courage, not simply to quote Rothko, but to make paintings that, at first glance, are similar. I would add to this, Arruda has the courage to paint and paint small. These small quiet, sometimes meditative canvases are not exactly following the trends of today's art world. Which, through my eyes, makes them even more special. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2022

Lucas Arruda's star is rising. After solo exhibitions at David Zwirner galleries around the world, and included in exhibitions at the Pinault collection, Parisians now have the opportunity to immerse themselves in another solo show at the Musée d'Orsay. In an age when the artists who attract attention are often working with new technologies, and dealing with hot political and social topics, Arruda paints pictures resembling landscapes or fully abstract, on very small canvases. But for Arruda, small is expansive. Small enables choice for Arruda. Small opens up possibilities for him to explore detail, to create surprises on the canvas, to obsessively go over and over and over. Often the brushes that he uses are so small that it can look as though he has scratched the surface, resembling hatching or a drypoint technique. From these markings, and a lot of scraping, pushing, and spreading of paint, light appears, waves on the ocean move, clouds burst, rain falls. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2021

To call the Arruda's paintings landscapes feels misleading. They are only landscapes, seascapes, clearings in a densely vegetated forest, or cloudscapes because we see this in them, satisfying our desire for familiarity. They are more like spaces into which we are invited to immerse our visual imaginations. It is also clear that Arruda doesn't set out to paint a landscape—and has been quoted as saying as much. Rather, he paints, strips away, pushes around, works and reworks until light appears, somewhere unanticipated. These delicate paintings are thus also about light. They have been called melancholic, but to my eyes, they are quite hopeful. The light of the moon and the sun comes out of clouds, splashes over waves, emanates from the canvas, as though it has been pulled out of the depths of the painting, found through a meticulous, painstaking going over and over. 

Lucas Arruda, Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2023

In order to see the radiance of these works, it's important to stand back and watch the pictures glow. Their luminosity is no doubt helped by the grey walls and the lighting at the Musée d'Orsay, like beacons of light pulling us towards them.  In one of the most exquisite paintings, Arruda's process finds a small moon in the ocean, a gesture of white paint, confusing the time in an already timeless place. A moon in the day light? A reflection of the sun behind clouds? A luminescence emerging from deep in the ocean? It's impossible to say. All we know is that there is something mysterious, something not quite of our world illuminating the one within the frame,

Lucas Arruda, Qu'importe le paysage @ Musée d'Orsay
Installation View

Arruda's horizons are always low, allowing more space for the clouds, air, light. Often they look to be etched, scratched, stripped where the paint moves horizontally, in a direction at odds with the paint covering the rest of the canvas. The horizon can be barely distinguishable, but it is always there, powerful and defined because it is horizontal. In addition, the air above moves to a different rhythm as well as a different direction from what we see as the water below. On exiting the rooms filled with nineteenth-century French painting, I was struck by the resonance of Arruda's graceful canvases with Courbet's blustering Stormy Sea (1870). While the mood and temperature of Courbet's painting bears no resemblance to Arruda's, the horizon line, fast and firm, going nowhere, is identical. The connections to Monet's light-filled canvases can also be appreciated from certain vantage points inside the Arruda exhibition. The resonances are not only seen in the emergence of light through paint, and the movement of paint as light, but the navigation of the horizontal and vertical, as well as the different paths paint takes around a canvas within these lines. Arruda's work might be filled with references, but he is an artist who has the confidence to do what comes to him, free of influence.

Do Ho Suh, Walk the House @ Tate Modern

Do Ho Suh, My Homes, 2010

As someone who has lived in different countries, I was fully immersed in and mesmerized by Do Ho Suh's Walk the House exhibition at Tate Modern. I was right there with him in his project to convince us of the ways that space and architecture are simply the tangible structures for housing identity, memory, and the experiences that give meaning to life. I immediately identified with his desire to find home—whatever that means—within walls, in the objects around him, the intuitive sense of the air that fills a space, the relationships developed therein. As a voyager, like him, I know that home has to be portable, able to be experienced in multiple apartments, carried on my back, across oceans and decades. But, I kept wondering if visitors rooted in a single country, culture, house or apartment were able to fully engage with the longing and yearning for belonging? These feelings are what really shape those of us who lead transitory lives.

Do Ho Suh, Blueprint, 2014

Immediately inside the exhibition, a series of works set a tone that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has spent a life in transition. Colourful images of homes on legs and wheels, rushing to the next location in My Homes (2010), or connected to a parachute flying across skies in (Haunting Home, 2019) are touching, playful, and all too real for those of us who have never sat still. Another work for which Do Ho Suh has used the same process— hundreds of multi-coloured threads embedded on paper—sees a facade of a New York apartment block with a figure blending into the tangled web of threads on the inside. The complex weave of life inside the front door, through the window, the emotions, experiences, woven into the fabric of daily life, that we nevertheless keep hidden from others are the substance of our life inside any space that we occupy. 

Do Ho Suh, Perfect Home: London, Horsham, New York, Berlin, Providence, Seoul, 2024

Do Ho Suh works in multiple media, but I especially enjoyed his use of fabric. In a work such as Perfect Home (2024), handles, locks, sockets, wall telephones, bells, keypads from multiple apartments in which the artist has lived are integrated into a transparent polyester model of his London apartment. Visitors are invited to walk through the space as well as around it, watching others as shadows—like ghosts—on the other side, removing the distinction between inside and outside, and with it the certainty of who occupies and who is locked out. Bringing together fixtures from multiple apartments across borders and oceans, cultures and customs, Do Ho Suh's Perfect Home is not fixed in time; it is an accumulation of times and spaces. The perfect home is marked by entrances and exits, the turning on and off of a light switch. Home, in this work is defined by the transitional, the motion between here and there. Similtaneously, home is the familiar, yet mundane things that we hold onto as if they were forever.   

Do Ho Suh, Nests, 2024

Thanks to the different forms and fabrics of his installations, the exhibition is connected by ideas and feelings about home and our relationships to spaces. Dong In Apartments (2022) is a video reconstruction of decaying modernist apartment blocks in Seoul shortly before their destruction. The camera halts at windows, furniture, floors, and walls, as if to document loss, searching for the crevices where memories live. Chairs remember the person who sat in them, the people who breathed the air are still there, the furniture arranged to bring back the lives whose stories are told by the walls. The film reminds us that space is not static, because time doesn't sit still, that the thresholds and props of our lives keep moving, if only, as is the case in this film, into demolition and another living and working space.

Do Ho Suh, Robin Hood Gardens, 2018
Film still

Houses, spaces, buildings carry memories inside their walls, the feeling of the air, the layout of the walls become so familiar that we navigate them intuitively, our eyes closed. Spaces created in concrete and steel look different when others are next to us, inside together. For Do Ho Suh, we carry this baggage on our backs, wherever we go. For him, Home is a feeling inside of which we are surrounded by the mess of our emotions and senses, nothing to do with the walls themselves. Across the exhibition, as we move through passageways, around fabric sculptures, up close to threaded images, we find the often invisible threads that bind us together across generations, oceans, and cultures. For all of the physical journeying that we undertake, the material that brings life to the notion of home, for Do Ho Suh, these threads, have both a material and non-material existence. And despite the physical existence of the walls around us, and the emphasis we place on the intransigence of objects, the overwhelming message of the exhibition is that home is carried inside us. 

Oliver Beer, Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2 Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2
Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Oliver Beer's paintings are mesmeric. Walking into Thaddaeus Ropac's Marais gallery was like entering a mystical space of worship. The experience was made haunting and mythical by the sound filling the main gallery space, the walls adorned with paintings, carrying the visitor into an almost transcendental state. Hung with one painting on the south wall and three on each of the side walls, the paintings could be mistaken for a transposition or translation of religious scenes, an abstraction of figures ascending from earth to the heavens. Moreover, the large paintings along side walls in the main gallery remind of triptychs on an altar.Wisps of earthy pigment drift upwards to blue and white skies. 

Oliver Beer, Resonance Painting (Winter Morning), 2025

Beer worked with singers in the Paleolithic painted caves of Dordogne, where he discovered that the voices had a unique resonance. The sound recordings were then placed beneath loose pigment covered canvases, the vibrations of the music moving pigments to create abstract forms, paintings that are literally a visualization of music, in images that remind of the mysterious cave paintings. On entry to the main gallery, I didn't know whether to look at or listen to the paintings. Inside the gallery, the music that inspired the work was played, inviting the visitor to drift into the spirit of the works. In the breaks between soundtracks, in the quiet of the space, we were shown that the paintings function in time. Beer's process is slow and develops over time, processing and then re-using the sound recorded in the Lascaux caves. Similarly, the experience of the paintings gathers profundity over the time spent with them.

Oliver Beer, Resonance Painting (Sweet Wood), 2025

Beer's paintings not only merge music/sound and painting, but they are filtered through history. In an interview, Beer tells of how the sonic vibrations in the caves become increasingly resonant when his microphone is closer to the drawings that have existed for thousands of years. Thus, the paintings become tracings of a history, even if the exact time period is not clear. We can only ever know that a history is behind the drawings, not what that history is. In addition, when recording, Beer discovered that certain frequencies of the human voice stimulate sounds from the cave walls, creating sounds that transcend those produced by the singers. The mystical sounds are thus created through the stories of the walls over thousands of years. Simultaneously, the sound filling the gallery space is reinforced as placeless, having travelled across distant times, belonging outside of the material world.

Oliver Beer, Resonance Paintings (Shadows), 2025

That said, there is also something very physical, even corporeal about the works. Having recently rewatched David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), the pulsations and vibrations of pigment formed on the surface of Beer's canvases reminded me of scars on bodies from accidents, skin ripped open and sewn back together, trauma traced on skin. While there is nothing traumatic about the paintings, we remember that the sense of the past is heightened by the traces of what took place before. In turn, though we do not know what happened to the Aurignacians (who painted the cave walls 15,000 years ago), we do know that they disappeared, moved on, perhaps because of climate change or disease. The darkness and lightness of history are thus brought to mind in these superb works.

Resonance Paintings: The Cave 2
Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Beer also talks about how his paintings speak to the history of art, in particular, twentieth century abstraction. Abstract painters have always been inspired by music, particularly in their search for painting beyond materiality and representation. Beer's works move into the space of complete abstraction when we are lifted up and away by them, as if to another realm, all the time maintaining their materiality. Beer's abstractions are both conceptually inspired by music and reach this transcendental ethereal space created through music. Similarly, as I say, Beer literally takes us to this realm through exploring the space between the two mediums, encouraging us both to listen and to look, simultaneously. As such, thanks to the synergetic space of image and sound, Beer's Resonance Paintings exceed the limits of abstract painting.