John Singer Sargent, Éblouir Paris

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Madame X, 1884

As the title of the John Singer Sargent exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay promises, these paintings dazzle. While Sargent's Portrait of Madame X (1884) is on all the publicity material for the exhibition, the woman with the porcelain skin and the risqué dress strap is only one of many treasures in the exhibition. What we see here is an artist immersed in the radical experiments of his time, someone who goes beyond the boundaries of what painting knew in the late nineteenth century as he discovers new ways of depicting modern life. Even though Sargent spent time in Paris, training at the École des Beaux-Arts and showing at the Salon, his work is relatively unknown in Paris and France. He enjoyed receiving portrait commissions from patrons in Europe and acknowledgment at the Salon, but the majority of his paintings are held in American museums and institutions which could explain why they are not so well known here.

John Singer Sargent, The Derelict, 1896

Among the qualities of painting that dazzles the eyes is Sargent's ability to capture an extraordinary, diffused luminosity. The light is so bright in some paintings that it is as if the work sits on a light box. Two paintings in particular struck me as studies of light, Dans le Jardin du Luxembourg (1879) and The Derelict (1896) in which a small boat is engulfed in otherwise gentle waves at dusk. The light from the setting sun, all but disappeared behind a curtain of cloud, looks to light up the ocean, soft and serene. In In the Luxembourg Gardens, the sun is higher, yellower, but the atmosphere is more even. There is an apparent dullness to the day, but on Sargent's canvas, it still radiates luminescence. In both paintings, it is Sargent's handling of white, yellow, and cobalt blue that enables water and sky to shimmer and shine. Sargent is known as a portrait painter, but in the urban paintings when people appear, faces are not important; it's the atmosphere which becomes the real subject matter. 

John Singer Sargent, Dans le jardin du Luxembourg, 1879

It will be noted that, for all its radiance, In The Luxembourg Gardens and other paintings have a blurred vision, as if Sargent is looking through an out of focus camera lens. This is perhaps because he was aware of the growing popularity of photography in his time, or because he intended to emphasize the atmosphere, not the actions in the urban setting. 

John Singer Sargent, Gertrude Vernon,
Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, 1893

In another striking innovation of Sargent's paintings, his brush could be so loose and fast that it's hard to imagine how the resultant sketchiness escaped criticism in his time. Beginning at the Ecole des Beaux Arts where emphasis was placed on the structure and rigorous academic approach to painting, Sargent soon moved to the atelier of Carulos Duran where he did away with academic requirements and loaded a brush with paint to be applied directly to the canvas. There is much to compare to the well-known painters of his day: Whistler's handling of white, Manet's realism, Monet's use of light as subject matter and theme. In addition, the loose, fast energy of impressionist brushstrokes resonate across Sargent's canvas. But, Sargent is unlike all these other artists, working in a style all his own. His portraits, often of women with clear, flawless faces, looking directly at the viewer and surrounded by a sea of brushstrokes are radical in ways that others were yet to discover. In this sense, The Portrait of Madame X is somewhat unusual in Sargent's oeuvre as it has a studied-ness and a build up that other portraits do not. 

John Singer Sargent, Rehearsal of the Pasdeloup Orchestra at the Cirque d'Hiver, 1879-1880

A painting that is both quite different in its subject matter and similar in its fast and fluid brushstrokes, is that of an orchestra rehearsing at the Cirque d'Hiver. Here, it is as if the music carries the painting away, filled with movement and an energy that captures the dynamism of the magic that happens when the orchestra is in full swing in this arena. Sargent paints the orchestra from behind and looking down, primarily because this was the view from where he sat when at the circus. However, once again, it is not the faces that matter, but the swirls and sweeps of the architecture, the swell of the music, the energy of the event. In this, his paintings are impressionist, but because they depict the rhythms of modern urban life, they are also realist. This unconventionality, even among painters who were known for their radicality, is the dazzle of Sargent's paintings shown in this wonderful exhibition.

Christopher Wool @ Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill

Christopher Wool @ Gagosian
Installation

The works in this exhibition - many paintings on paper - were quite different from what I associate with Christopher Wool's art. Known for his stencils, screen prints and spray paint, I think of Wool's post-pop conceptual paintings as fast, flat, and without surface texture. By contrast, the small works on display in this latest London exhibition were filled with dense, thick paint in gestural sweeps, curves, and coils. Similarly, in the works exhibited here, Wool ventures beyond his familiar black and white into pink, ochre, grey and sandy. The lyricism and poetry of thick brushstrokes over silkscreen, spraypaint, and stencils make the works closer to expressionism than to pop or conceptual. Indeed, at moments they reminded me more of Philip Guston's early expressionist works and at other times verging into impasto with their thick build up of paint on a fragile surface.

Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2018

Most of these paintings are reworkings, rewritings, modifications of Wool's earlier works. He takes old editions and in a process of erasure, addition, digital modification, creates entirely new works that are also deep with self-referentiality and self-replication. As if to announce his need to rethink, repeat and simultaneously erase, or make something entirely new of what already exists, Wool has crossed out earlier signatures and dates on the prints and re-inscribed with new date and signature. Such recycling is both like a dance that circles back on an earlier work, and a starting again, revealing obsessions and an announcement that "this is how I have developed as an artist."

Christopher Wool @ Gagosian
Installation

There is also a noticeable theme of doubling, mirrors, repetition and copying being explored in the works on exhibition. Works such as a series of Untitled black oil and inkjets on paper from 2022 explore two halves of the same, though the shapes differ. It is as Wool has folded the print in the middle and pressed the paint across the fold. In other works in which different modes of paint application layer the paper, the lines between two halves are sketchier, but nevertheless visibler. At still other times, coils and curls are painted over the two halves of a page as if to create a shadow between one and the other, though it's not clear which is the object and which the shadow. In a further repetition, the winding, twisting coils of industrial materials made into sculptures can be seen as mirroring the paintings on the wall. 

Christopher Wool, Untitled, 2021

As mentioned, also on display at Grosvenor Hill are Wool's winding and coiling sculptures. Coils and loops and twists and turns echoing those made with spray guns underneath paint on the paintings are realized in three dimensions and placed on the gallery floor. The sculptures are fashioned out of found copper-plated steel and bronze. The twists, turns, and knots made me think of the confusion of my mind, moving in multiple different directions, following different rhythms and coming together in a poetic ambiguity. Sitting somewhere between industrially produced and hand made (with welding and obviously shaped), the sculptures are an enigma. But, their communication with the repainted monotypes gives them a sense of a whole they might not have on their own. 

As the press release for the exhibition put it so nicely, Wool is an artist pushing at the edges of abstraction. What wasn't mentioned, however, is his fascination with industrial materials, fabrication, waste, and all the processes between manufacture and demolition that have become so familiar in the twentieth century. I managed to see the Christopher Wool exhibition on its final day, and I am only sorry that I didn't go earlier and get the word out so that more people could have enjoyed it.  

Copyright Images Gagosian Gallery

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.