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

Boilly: Chroniques Parisiennes @ Musée Cognacq-Jay

Etude avec cinq autoportraits de l'artiste, vers 1823-1827

Louis-Léopold Boilly was a revolutionary artist, in all senses of the word. His oeuvre sits between two revolutions—those of 1789 and 1848—and so it's not surprising that he often depicts the people of the streets. Unlike painters and portraitists of his and previous generations in France, Boilly had a suspicious view of the bourgeoisie, the police, the army. His real subject matter was everyday life. Moreover, it was everyday life on the streets of the city. 

Most exciting about Boilly's painting was his thirst for new technologies and what they could bring to painting. I knew enough about his work from the pieces in the Louvre to know that he was pushing at the boundaries between painting and theatre, but what is revealed in full scale over and over again in this current exhibition at the Musée Cognacq-Jay is the way that Boilly looked forward to the cinematic image.

La prison des Madelonnettes, rue des Fontaines, 1815-1819

In painting after painting, Boilly plays with what will become the defining characterstic of the cinema two hundred years later. His figures look from different perspectives, in motion, in scenes that give the illusion of motion. In Le prison des Madelonnettes, rue des Fontaines, for example, he juxtaposes light and shadow in the two halves of the painting and each is filled with people and their pursuit of morally good and bad activities respectively. Looking at this work, we also get a sense of a developing narrative unfolding across the width of a painting, statues being brought to life, in two halves that are like scenes whose relationship is only established in the image itself. 

Jean qui rit et Jean qui pleure, vers 1808-1810

Visitors to the exhibition will also notice that Boilly was fascinated with illusion, with effect, with expression as a way to attract a response. There are doublings and mirrorings everywhere in his work. His figures have exquisitely painted faces filled with emotions and expressions, the fabrics of their clothes are so textured that we want to touch them. But the bodies are often distorted, misshapen, slightly out of proportion. It is as if they are being seen through a distorting lens. And then in the final room of the exhibition, there is the object that the whole thing has been moving towards: a camera obscura and a selection of early optical toys—a zograscope, telescope, a pantographe. These are the instruments Boilly used to see the world differently, through new optics, that he then translated into painting. It's easy to imagine that had Boilly lived one hundred years later, he might have turned to the cinema for his artistic expression.

Un Trompe l'oeil, detail, vers 1800

Perhaps the reason that Boilly is not as well known today is his diversity and range. He moved from portraits to genre paintings, to city scapes, trompe l'oeil, caricatures and still life. Boilly never sat still long enough to develop a reputation for anything. Similarly, he painted the kinds of people that the salons had no interest in: prostitutes, criminals, poor artists such as himself, those mixed up in the hustle and bustle of the train station. In this, his voracious appetite for experimentation and innovation made him so far ahead of his time that no one would have known what to do with him. 

La Marche Incroyable, vers 1797

Ultimately, this lovely exhibition shows Boilly to be a man of his age, but as such, he is a man ahead of his time. Boilly was inspired by streets taken over by masses of people, by train stations and street dwellers. And he was interested in depicting his modern world through the instruments of his time. He blurred the boundaries between mediums where painting and photography (hence the grey of his works) and sculpture are brought to life. His depictions of theatre in the streets, together with multi-perspectival pictures that preface the cinema made him a man reaching for modernity on the streets of Paris, even before it had fully arrived.