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.