Ellsworth Kelly: Formes et Couleurs, 1949-2915 @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Ellsworth Kelly, Spectrum VIII, 2014

Wandering through rooms empty of visitors with Ellsworth Kelly's bright colored forms and shapes on walls and floors, I realized why the few people I know who have visited the exhibition were not so impressed. Even though we are looking at striking forms, there is very little to hold onto, no brushstrokes or human emotion for example to identify with. Kelly's is conceptual art in the form of painting. The paintings challenge the mind and eyes, engaging in interesting questions of painting, but do little to warm the heart. 

Ellsworth Kelly, Three Gray Panels, 1987

That said, many of them embrace a playfulness that connects to our experiences of seeing in every day life. On entry to the exhibition, I was excited to see Three Gray Panels, 1987 strategically placed along a single wall, asking us to question how we look and what we see. Each panel is a different shade and shape of gray, a middle grey resulting in the appearance of a canvas a bulging outwards, a very flat dark gray, and a concave-appearing light gray. As I moved across and around the three canvases, their shapes appeared to change, and I wondered how my eyes could deceive me in such an obvious way? Having had my eyes tested a few days earlier, I was struck by the transience of sight, and thus, the potential inaccuracy of its measurement. If Kelly's forms change shape and appearance depending on the conditions of looking, then how reliable are the eye tests that determine corrective lenses? Will my eyes see the letters differently if they are placed next to a different letter? Will I see something different looking from above or below as opposed to directly? Kelly's play with colors and forms on walls, one often on top of another, prompts us to question the reliability of what we see. 

Exhibition of Colored Panels (Red Yellow Blue Green Violet) 
Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

This insight however only comes with time. Effectively, the lessons of Kelly's shapes demand that we look from multiple perspectives, under different lights, at different distances. Without moving around the works, it's impossible to discover them. Curiously, the wall texts did not encourage such movement. In one example, Yellow Relief from 1955 did not look like a square on first sighting. I stood quite close and the panel in relief looked bigger, my eyes caught by the seam and its shadow where the two panels met. Then, to my surprise, looking back from the other side of the room at a distance, the seam had disappeared and a perfect yellow square appeared to my eyes. If only the text had given visitors hints to discover these revelations. As it was, I noticed how many visitors walked through the exhibition at a pace because they didn't know what they were meant to be looking at or how to look. 

Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Relief, 1955

The text talked about Kelly's interest in the shapes created by shadows over light, negative spaces, windows, and the play between looking out a window and at a figure and form. In addition, I would say that he was also interested in folds and seams. There is no trace of the paintbrush in his paintings, or any ornamentation for that matter. Instead, such points of fascination—something to hold on to—come in the shape, and particularly, from the overlay of multiple panels. Thus, for example, in White Curves II, 1978, two part circular aluminium panels painted white are overlayed to look like a circle folded. The shadows created by one over the other become part of the work, and the appearance of the top panel as a fold of the bottom, again deceiving the eye and unravelling our assumptions about what we are looking at. 

Ellsworth Kelly, Yellow Curve, 1990

To me, the brilliance of these works is magnified when thinking about them in juxtaposition with American art in the 1960s. While the abstract expressionists were expressing emotion and reinstating painterly gesture on the cavas, Kelly was using painting to ask philosophical questions about perception. He was also extending painting beyond the frame in ways unheard of in those postwar years. Kelly made painting architectural, filling space, not only transforming the way that we saw art on walls, but the way that it interacted with its architectural environment. This is superbly exhibited in Yellow Curve, 1990 in which a yellow painting on canvas on wood is placed on the floor of a pure white space, under artifical daylight. Depending on where we stand in relation to Yellow Curve, the walls and the air become bathed in yellow. Although this piece was made in 1990, it's illustrative of how Kelly was changing the parameters of painting, eschewing the rules so to speak, in ways that understandably made his painting difficult to understand. 

Carol Bove, Vase/Face @ David Zwirner

Carol Bove, Vase/Face, 2022

Steel is one of those materials that surrounds us. Yet, despite or perhaps because of its ubiquity, we tend to ignore it. At best, we dismiss it as dull, sterile, uninspiring. Steel is the fabric and function of industrialized life, and therefore, it bears no more thinking about. Once we have seen John Chamberlain's crumpled steel sculptures, and learnt of the expressive possibility of the material, we probably won't look at steel in the same way again. Chamberlain's steel sculptures fly in the face of everything that steel is meant to do. It is meant to be stalwart and unflinching, cold and repellent. And yet, for Chamberlain, steel creates puzzles, it is an enigma, an idea without weight. 

John Chamberlain, Opera Chocolates, 1994

Carol Bove's current exhibition at David Zwirner's Marais gallery does something different again. Something that we would never expect steel to do. Bove makes steel into a warm material, filled with emotion, a sense of play, a material that even has the innate tendency to exude tenderness. In Bove's sculptures, steel is everything it is not meant to be. 

Seeing Carol Bove's new steel sculptures on exhibition around the corner from John Chamberlain's familiar crumpled cars at Karsten Greve makes Bove's work even more peaceful, delicate, and emotionally charged. The cynic might want to say that Bove couldn't possibly do anything new with steel, that Chamberlain took steel to its ultimate beyond. But Bove's work is different, made in a different moment, speaking to a different world. Unlike Chamberlain's, Bove's sculptures are not in conversation with abstract expressionism and the fraught energy of brushstrokes by the likes of De Koonig and Kline. Her curious lengths of manipulated tubular, painted steel might be in conversation with painting. The pink, yellow and orange pieces, bent, turned, folded and scrunched together might be hung on walls, but unlike Chamberlain's, Bove's sculptures do not use the language of painting. Rather, they remind us of animated stick figures and squiggles, always about to jump off the walls and change their shape. If Chamberlain's meticulously worked, spray painted piles of steel make sense in an era when images were influenced by a need to move away from representation, Bove's connect to an era in which images are technologically determined.

Carol Bove, Vase/Face, 2022
David Zwirner

Again in a refusal of the deterministic nature of the image today, Bove makes works that are intensely physical and material. They are strikingly sensuous - not something that can easily be said about steel. The smooth matte paint, evenly applied, bears no trace of gesture or the artist's thoughtful application (unlike the rainbow of colours sprayed and painted over Chamberlain's). But the surface is given the appearance of velvet. It is all we can do to stop ourselves from reaching out to touch them. 

Carol Bove, Vase/Face, 2022
David Zwirner

In Zwirner's main gallery, the sandblasted steel tubes are contorted and crumpled, folded over huge glass disks, as though hugging or stroking the human-sized circular shapes. The grey walls, floor and wrought iron glass ceiling create an environment in which everything is possible. The challenge to the materials of both glass and steel through creating relationships between them that are more like friends in a grey space, turn sculptures into living, breathing beings that shift and change as we walk around the gallery space, seeing them from different perspectives. There is no doubt after visiting this exhibition, that neither grey, nor steel, can be said to be the unyielding and uninteresting phenomena that the world claims them to be. 

Carol Bove, Vase/Face, 2022
David Zwirner

If Chamberlain creates a physical experience inviting us to navigate the twists and turns of newly manipulated metal scavanged from scrap heaps and abandoned cars, commenting on capitalism, car culture, the hard edged industrial world that has gone awry, Bove's is a world in which our eyes and our emotions come into conversation. Her works don't so much shape space as Chamberlain's do. But they do push our senses to limits that they have not otherwise been challenged to go. 

Charles Ray @ Centre Pompidou

Charles Ray, Self-Portrait, 1990

Ray entertains the similarities and differences between mannequins and sculpture. His sculptures are mannequins, but they take poses that are one step removed from familiar classical sculptures. For example, a boy crouched down to pick something from the ball of his foot reminds us of the Hellenistic sculpture of a boy removing a thorn from the same. Boy with Frog 2009 stands in the pose of a classical sculpture, even though it is clearly a contemporary image of a typical boy with his catch. However, unlike its function in centuries past, for Ray, sculpture is a form of advertising, and a clothes horse for naked bodies. But it is also about the mannequin as a double, the mannequin as art work, as a performance of the social, cultural sexual relations that we actually live. 

Charles Ray, Fall '91, 1992

All of Ray's figures are the wrong size. That is, they are over or undersized, asking us to look up to or down on the figures. Thus, our relationship to his sculptures is quite different from what we expect. In a work such as Fall '91, an oversized mannequin changes her size, depending on where we stand as we look. From afar, she looks like a mannequin of human size, but up close, she is a giant. Unless, of course, we see someone standing next to her when we are at a distance, then we know how big she really is. This is deception of size has been a characteristic of sculpture for centuries. Michelangelo's David was made for a pedestal in a public square, therefore, from below. Accordingly, his figure is distorted so that when we look up at him, the figure is perfectly human-sized and proportioned. 

Charles Ray, Portrait of the Artist's Mother, 2021

Much of the work seems to be about generations, about the relations between children and parents. The sculpture of his mother in the pose with a slight twist on that of Manet's Olympia is sees an oversized woman masturbating. Mothers are clearly a big influence on Ray. It's difficult not to see the large and the small figures as playing on the power relations in families.  When the children are the same size as the parents, surely Ray is not creating bridges between generations, but giving a very immediate sense of how one generation is threatening and overwhelming another. Alternatively, we may see the sculptures of things and people as proportioned according to the size that they take up in our minds. 

Charles Ray, Family Romance, 1993

Ray also has a fascination for fabrics. But like the sizes of his sculptures, the material in which they are made is always off. The small person bending down to tie his shoe lace (reminding us of the boy taking the splinter out of his foot) is fabricated in stainless steel. The sensuousness of classical sculptures in marble and bronze are transferred to the industrially produced steel. Similarly, there is always an emphasis on the plasticity and construction of the body as a performative vessel - even when it is in a photograph of Ray himself. Even when he uses real hair, the figure looks plastic, or fabricated. This, of course, makes them completely different from the realist figures of a sculptor such as Ron Muecke - in fact, Ray's are the exact opposite. The figures are clearly representations, without empathy, without any hold on the viewer's emotions. Again, even in the self-portrait photographs, Ray looks like a mannequin of himself,. 

Charles Ray, No, 1992