Imran Qureshi, The Seeming Endless Path of Memory @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Pantin

Imran Qureshi, Love Me, Love Me Not, 2019 (on left);
Love Me, Love Me Not (Diptych), 2019

Imran Qureshi’s painting, now on exhibition Thaddaeus Ropac’s Pantin gallery, in The Seeming Endless Path of Memory, is an art of opposites colliding, connecting, flowing into and out of one another. No matter how I looked at this compelling exhibition of otherwise abstract painting I saw doubling, splitting, folding, repetition, and contradictions: each opposite comes alive through technique, form and associations both within a single painting and in their turn to the world outside the gallery. It’s a fascinating body of work that, while potentially familiar to audiences in other parts of the world, is little known here in France.

Imran Qureshi, The Endless Path, 2018

Querishi is Pakistani, an identity that influences and shapes the paintings in ways that I am not able to comment on. For example, the titles of a number of the works on exhibition are taken from the poetry of Pakistani Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), and other works are drawn from the ornamental motifs of the miniaturist style that were traditionally commissioned by the Mughal Emperors (1526-1857). 

Imran Qureshi, The Leprous Brightness, 2019

However, even without these references, visitors will be struck by the range of emotional extremes the artist invites us to experience in front of the works. Many of them are about bifurcation, folding and doubling, but on another level, are violent and aggressive, filled with anger and destruction that can be seen in, for example, the explosions of red paint on unsuspecting surfaces. Then, while immersed in the same extreme emotional register, we notice a blooming flower emerging, that, in turn, becomes a heart at the centre of the image, from which waves of serenity reverberate. Over time, the flowers transform into explosions of paint, like fireworks erupting on the canvas. And before we know it, they have morphed into a memory of Anselm Kiefer’s ashen sunflowers hanging their heads before the tragedies they have witnessed. And like Kiefer’s sunflowers, there is always a glimmer of hope somewhere on Qureshi’s canvas. For example, in Love Me, Love Me Not, 2019, a delicate blue line, like a vine filled with life climbs the length of a bloody red stem, suggesting that there will always be regrowth, even after the most tumultuous of blasts. In other paintings, the explosion is so filled with dynamism and movement that there is no question life will continue even before the memories go cold.

Imran Qureshi, Separated, 2019

Speaking of memories, the title of the exhibition, The Seeming Endless Path of Memory, and the obvious references to trauma, death, murder and other violence in the show, would suggest the dominance of the past in the present. However, the application of paint, the sense of a journey to the inside of the human body, or even the impressions left on the canvas that resemble Yves Klein-like bodily movement, bring the paintings into the present. Qureshi’s unique application of paint to large canvases makes it look as though it could have been splashed on just yesterday. The large red paintings are also evocative of birth, of creation, especially when gold leaf covered egg shape supports are splattered with thick red paint, reminding us of ovaries or even unhatched eggs. Like the narrative of birth, the egg-shaped twins are as much the bloody mess of emerging into the world, about separation, division, where no half is ever the same, but always dependent on the other half, as they are about coupling, of unity, of the perfect understanding and fluidity between one half and the other. Like the single canvases which are all actually two stuck together, the paintings are about the yin and the yang, the impossibility of having one without the other: two halves of the same whole. 

Imran Qureshi, Do You Remember Still, How It Was Once, 2019 

And then we learn that some of the works – particularly that of an open Koran splattered in red – remember the shootings at the New Zealand mosque in March 2019.  Even still, it is impossible to enter Thaddaeus Ropac and not be reminded of blood splattered floors and walls that are the result of a mass murder. The red is dripped over the canvas, giving very little density to the paint, even when the area becomes dark. But with the knowledge of the artist’s expression of the Christchurch mosque massacres, the works start to become a serious critique of the ones who killed. The implication becomes that without those muslims, the 49 victims of mass slaughter, the ones who did the killings are nothing. When every half depends on the other for completion, to kill the enemy is to kill one’s self. 

Imran Qureshi, This Day and The Anguish of This Day, 2019

Visitors will also be reminded of Yves Klein’s works. Not only for the resplendent cobalt blue, but the traces, smudges and smearings of paint that recall the mistakes, the humanness of the application of paint. The body, both inside and out – its symmetry, imaged across two canvases is like an echo of Klein’s “Anthropometrie” series from 1960. Other of Qureshi’s paintings have the impression of brightly coloured x-rays. The inside of the body is on full display in blue, red and gold. But it’s the blue that most reminds us of Klein. Blue is the sea, the sky, and that long history of art that privileges lapis lazuli and gold, articulating the preciousness of painting which is, sadly, inseparable from the economic exploitation of painting. Blue is the landscape, blue is the history of a bird flying across the sky, blue is the wealth of the history of painting on a single canvas. 

Kiefer Rodin @ Musée Rodin

Anselm Kiefer, Auguste Rodin, les cathédrales de France, 2016

The last time I went to the Musée Rodin was in 1984, and my suspicion is, it probably hasn’t changed that much. And yet, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Rodin was so much more interesting than the The Kiss, The Thinker and Balzac. It took Anselm Kiefer to be exhibited in the museum for me to get back there, but it was the Rodin sculptures that were the real discovery.

Anselm Kiefer, Berthe au Grand Pied, 2016 (detail)

I did not know many of the works on display even existed, and I would never have associated them with Rodin. All the famous, very classical, conservative sculptures are shown on the ground floor of the museum that was once his studio in rue Varenne. The most fascinating work, however, is on the first floor. The extensive collection which he donated to the state to establish his legacy includes unfinished bodies charging out of marble blocks, miniature limbs lined up in rows in glass vitrines, plaster dipped cloth covering fragmented bodies in pain, torsos clutching urns, and scenes on oversized columns. Work after sculptural work by Rodin reveals his occupation at the forefront of modernity in a way that I never imagined he would have. His fascination for the body became materialized in sculpture an obsession with its movement, its capacity to express emotion, its convergence with the materiality of sculpture. Yes, he was interested in form, perfect human replication, but at the Rodin was so much more.

Auguste Rodin, Hands of a Pianist, 1909

The exhibition of Kiefer’s works in the downstairs temporary gallery is filled with familiar oversized Kiefer canvases, sculptures speaking the decay and destruction of hope, knowledge, humanity, paintings that glimpse possibility, stairways leading nowhere, nature without promise of regeneration. Of course, the work, particularly Kiefer’s familiar use of lead, is compelling – from the peeling lead on August Rodin: les cathédrales de France (2016) to the ashen sunflower covered in lead – and moving. And in the enclosed arcade gallery, the works in vitrines are exquisite. Nevertheless, I am always ambivalent towards Kiefer’s monumental self-obsession, and this exhibition seemed to reinforce my disillusionment. It all looked very familiarly Kiefer.

Anselm Kiefer, La Conscience des Pierres, 2014

Included in the exhibition is – of course – a series of handmade books that cannot be opened, books that cannot be read. On them are images of naked women emerging from watercoloured marble. The paintings are exquisite and delicate and tactile on the page, but I wasn’t in the mood for naked women with bleeding genitals painted by one of the West’s most successful male artists. However, I was, at least, beginning to see the connection between Kiefer and Rodin. Women’s bodies seemingly floating through air, sensuous and erotic, emerging from marble were convinced by Kiefer may have been inspired by Rodin.

Auguste Rodin, Dernière Vision, 1902

But it was upstairs. On the first floor that everything fell into place. Rodin was in fact interested in all the same preoccupations as Kiefer – not just naked women with exposed genitals. The abundance of casts and fragments of bodies, from delicate fingers to broken torsos in impossible positions, reveal how, like Kiefer, Rodin was always thinking about issues of death and rebirth, of decay and the inevitable dilapidation of life. He was interested in materials, in fabrics, and their fixing in plaster. Rodin, like Kiefer was a collector, and an organizer of objects, placing knowledge in vitrines to preserve, display, categorize, and fix in history. Similarly, they both used the same materials: plaster, metal, fabric, marble. Although Rodin did not reach for lead as often as Kiefer, the same themes of transformation and alchemy are there in the narratives of his sculptural figures.   

A vitrine of body parts

Of course, there were also many differences, aspects of Rodin’s work that did not weigh so heavily on Kiefer. The most obvious being that Rodin was always in search of the inexpressibility of emotion. His sculptures are always looking to capture emotion in the sculpted body, no matter how big or small. Even when the figures are in a narrative or have some kind of historical reference, their purpose is to give form to emotion. For Kiefer, however, making art is always an intellectual process. And his works are formed by the search for the inexpressible knowledge of what it means to be always in the process of dying, and waiting to be reborn. Whether it is his own identity, or that of Germany, World War II or a more distant history, Kiefer always looks to define a lifespan across time.

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Canaletto-Guardi. Les Deux Maîtres de Venise, Musée Jacquemart-André

Canaletto, La Place Saint-Marc, vers l'est, 1723

I have to admit, lover of modern art that I am, this has to be my pick of the fall exhibitions I have seen in Paris so far. When my friend Jim suggested we go to the Canaletto-Guardi exhibition at the Musée Jacquemart-André, and then when we were greeted with a 45 minute wait on arrival, I was not convinced. Once inside I was seduced by the richness of these treasured paintings and the comfort of their display. One of my biggest problems with the major Paris museums is their zeal to stage massive and overwhelming exhibitions. Unlike the major museums, the Musée Jacquemart-André does not feel this same urge to place Canaletto and Guardi’s work in an extensive, and ultimately unnecessary context. The exhibition is devoted entirely to the “Venice-scapes” of Canaletto and his student Francesco Guardi. Indeed, it is a treat from beginning to end.

Francesco Guardi, La Fête du jeudi gras sur la Piazzetta, 1712-93

Before the entrance to the exhibition, there is a small display on the camera obscura. I can’t be sure why it is there because examining the display would have meant losing my place in the line for the entrance. But I assume that Canaletto and/or Guardi were using a camera obscura for the designs of the buildings, in particular, and also the relationship between water and buildings on the Venice canals. I say this because the mathematical precision to every building, their form, their masonry, their ornamentation, is extraordinary. The detail down to the last window sill forges a realism that will find its most articulate embodiment in the photographic image 150 years later. In addition, like the image created through a camera obscura, the paintings' perspectival vision is as it would be seen through a lens. The lateral sweep of Guardi’s paintings give his images an anamorphic distortion, including the convex curve of the water as it meets the buildings along the canal. Likewise, the depth of field in Canaletto’s suggest a deep focus lens. And in both cases, the rigor of the detail remains razor sharp even as the water flows to a diminishing perspective in Canaletto’s painting and across the horizontal axis of Guardi’s. 

Francesco Guardi, Le Canale di Cannaregio,
avec la Palazzo Surian-Bellotto, l'ambassade de France vers 1778-80

What’s also exciting about the perspective is that we are placed in a position somewhere before and above the piazzas and the waterways: we look into them, our eye being channeled vertically through the spaces of Canaletto’s Venice, and then when our gaze reaches the back of the square, or the other side of the lagoon, we are lifted upwards and outwards, into a voluminous and luminous sky. The movement through the paintings articulates a curious depth of field that initially follows the principles of classical perspective, and then when our eye reaches the vanishing point, it is as though we are placed behind a camera in motion, on a crane, taking us on a journey perpedicular to the picture plane and then parallel to it. And yet, we are still in the mid-eighteenth century. 

Francesco Guardi, Le Campo Santa Maria del Giglio, vers 1770

I could write endlessly about the richness and intrigue of these paintings, but other than the perspectival renderings, the one element that will charm every viewer is the use of light and lighting: the shadows as they fall across the Piazza San Marco, the luminosity of the sky that somehow illuminates the squares and waterways of the mysterious Venice, the reflections on the waterways as the Venetians go about their business being so perfect that we can identify the time of day effortlessly. The light of the day is in turns sharp and soft, giving the details of the buildings, creating the atmosphere of the activities on the water, in Piazza San Marco. And the colors, as we know them, are the colors of Venice: deep reds, contrasting the blues and greens of the water, sky and the earth tones for the buildings that line the canal. The clarity of these paintings is the light, but it is also in the color and form of composition. 

Canaletto, L'Entré du Grand Canal, avec Santa Maria della Salute et le canal de la Giudecca,
vue de l'extrémité occidentale du Môle, 1722

Venice in the mid-eighteenth century comes alive in these paintings. And it is a Venice where people are always working – they consistently stand in twos or threes, deep in discussion, doing deals no doubt, or alone, carrying, pushing, selling, As they are pictured here, and as we know them through reputation, the Venetians are always working. They do not relax in the way that we do in Venice today, drinking coffee, eating icecream, watching people and idly walking around Piazza San Marco. Canaletto and Guardi remind us of Venice as it was meant to be, not as the museum it has become.

I can’t possibly write about the exhibition without mentioning our fellow visitors. At a conservative estimate Jim and I were at least twenty years younger than the other visitors. And because of the small spaces, together with the crowds, we were thrust together with them, subjected to telephone conversations, the usual French pushing and shoving, the audio tours turned up too loud, and incredulous stares as Jim and I discussed the paintings - in English. This is both a word of warning, and preparation for an atmosphere that bustles with a liveliness that has to be taken as part of the Canaletto and Guardi experience.