Luc Delahaye, Le Bruit du Monde @ Jeu de Paume

Luc Delahaye, Taxi, 2016

After years of looking at Luc Delahaye's photographs, Luc Delahaye. le Bruit du Monde gives an opportunity to understand them. My long held ignorance of the Delahaye's photography may come from my own short sightedness that led, in turn, to a struggle to see the tension in the large format documentary works. Alternatively, it could be that the current exhibition at the Jeu de Paume gives a wonderful overview of his oeuvre, particularly highlighting his transition from documentary to art photographer. Seeing all the work in one place, Delahaye's search for "truth" and "reality" of the image across his career not only coheres the oeuvre, but reveals his multi-pronged approach. 

Luc Delahaye, The Milosevic Trial, 2002

What I appreciated in the early photographs in exhibition, particularly those that I had not seen before, was the discord between the space and the actions taking place therein. For example, the emotional void of the banal space in which Slobodan Milosevic's trial takes place. The bloody brutality of his crimes is nowhere to be seen in the trial room, thus creating a puzzling photograph that makes us take a closer a look, thinking that we might have missed something. Or witness the discrepancy between the darkened space and George W Bush's speech to European Allies following the end of the Gulf War. In the speech, Bush emphasized lasting peace in the Middle East and the end of conflict in Gaza as being within reach. Delahaye's darkened hall screams doubt: a doubt that has become a reality in the twenty years since the photograph was taken. 

Luc Delahaye, George Bush at Concert Noble, 2005

While, from the beginning, Delahaye's photographs have always manipulated reality—how can a photograph do otherwise—as the 2000s wore on, Delahaye turned more frequently to "composed photographs." These works are made of multiple images, to capture a reality or truth that is inherent to events before the camera. Delahaye removes the distortions of photography to make images closer to how we see the world. Nevertheless, the reality that he creates is never the one seen by a photograph, or the human eye. There is always a marked out of frame, the person doing the shooting, the bomb from which people are running, the man who is shot, do not appear in the image. We only ever see the results and traces of disaster. The depiction of the aftermath simply draws attention to the reality beyond the frame, that which is invisible to the eye.

Luc Delahaye, Les Pillards, Port-au-Prince, 2012

Delahaye sees the world through disaster eyes. Death, corruption, war and violence everywhere, greed and power running riot. Among the works on view are his black and white diary photographs in which he takes pictures of everything in his day. In these, we see images taken from newspapers, with figures such as Barack Obama, paintings, sculptures, Nicolas Sarkozy. No matter the content of the image, it's difficult to see them as about anything but power, and thus, continuing the violence. A photograph of Gerhard Richter's September painting is a typical Delahaye image - the aftermath of unspeakable violence, the tower spewing smoke, many times removed in a photograph of a painting of television images. So yes, Delahaye's work is about violence and the disasters of the world that we are living in, but it is also about the way that we see these events, and we are left asking, "what is the truth that lies behind them?" Both the events and the images. 

Luc Delahaye, Les Témoins, 2016

Finally, in one of the most exquisite works on display at the Jeu de Paume, Delahaye's Les Témoins, 2016 depicts inkjet print stills from a video recorded in February 2016 at a morgue in the city hospital in Jenin in the occupied West Bank. The video showed the ritual cleansing of three young Palestinian bodies following their attack on Israeli police in Jerusalem. In Delahaye's piece, we see hands laid over a chest, hands falling to a side, hands coming together, and in the middle, the head and shoulders of a body, taken from below. The reference is clear: the christ like imagery, and the practice of cleaning and praying for the dead as it is described in the bible. The coming together of the women to send the body off to the Lord. Of course, Delahaye's interest in the religious symbolism is, once again, around violence and death.

Sean Scully, Blue @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Sean Scully, Night Sea, 2025

Walking into Thaddaeus Ropac's main space in the Marais gallery feels like stepping into an oasis of still blue water. Blue is given new life in Scully's otherwise familiar squares and rectangles. Blue is a colour that comes with a long history in art, loaded with signs of wealth and opulence thanks to Lapis Lazuli, an escape into nature—skies, oceans, rivers and mountains—and Picasso's fall into melancholy in his blue period. Under Scully's brush, blue takes on a complexity, flowing from material to imaginative, human made to nature, evoking calm to agitation. The exhibition is quiet, lulling, and as indicated by Scully's verse printed on the vestibule gallery wall, poetic.

Sean Scully, Blue, Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac

Standing in the centre of the small exhibition in which three 70' x 70' oil on copper paintings sit along three walls respectively, while being lulled by the feeling of lapping waves and gently rippling waters, I kept wondering, how many variations are there on the colour blue? And, can blue be grey and green, sometimes maroon and black? Certainly, for Scully, they are. What happens when blue moves closer to red, or white or black are added to make blue gesture in ways that it might not otherwise? In Scully's paintings, blue deepens its expression, lyricism, and effusion of serenity.

Sean Scully, Wall Blue Blue, 2025

The nine paintings in this exhibition are unique, and in turn, every square and rectangle within a single work is different from the next. Not only is the colour of each different, but the brushstrokes are sometimes horizontal, at others vertical, and still others, both. On occasion the stroke turns, swerves, returns, starts again, but always within the form of the given square or rectangle. The paint moves fast across the copper support, in one stroke of the hand, or multiple. The speed of oil paint on copper fills a blue field with energy and movement, but never interferes with the tranquility of the whole.

Sean Scully, Wall Cobalt White, 2025

For Scully, paintings always begin from a place, a place in memory, a place he has been, a place in the world. The squares and rectangles within each work remind of the patterns given to us in the built environment, and also nature. In the small catalogue accompanying the exhibition we see Scully's photographs of two such places: blue doors, slatted wooden walls. Having seen the photographs, it becomes impossible to see anything but these walls and doors in the paintings. For me, without reading the titles of the paintings, without seeing the images on which they are based, the intense blue is about water: the cool and inviting worlds of fresh water, a sea at rest. But it is a body of water filled with emotion and passion, feeling, running, and at times, unsettled.