Giacometti in the Tanks @ Tate Modern

The exhibition of a dozen Giacometti sculptures in the former oil tanks underneath Tate Modern is an exquisite display of his work. The experience of being in these haunting dark spaces is breathtaking. I have seen Giacometti's men walking, women standing, their bodies trapped by the intensity of their material, in memorable settings. At the Art Institute of Chicago, at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen and here in Paris at the Montparnasse atelier being stand out displays of the emaciated, elongated bronzes. But the fragility and vulnerability of misshapen bodies so beautifully articulated by sparse lighting and hard concrete walls in the depths of Tate Modern took them to another level. 

I thought I would pop in to see these familiar works on my way out of the Mendieta exhibition, but I was so entranced by the quiet reflection, the delicacy of Giacometti's figures that I struggled to leave them. So much of the tone of the exhibition is in the chiaroscuro lighting, as if the bronze figures are shyly hiding underneath the great bulwark of a building. They are frail and vulnerable, misshapen, some even missing limbs, and their shadows distorted against the industrial walls of the oil tanks, hardened concrete with its own variations in wear and tear. Interestingly, contrary to Tate's website, I didn't think they evoked the isolation and alienation of Giacometti sculptures in other settings. Rather, they were resilient, quietly reflecting on their entrapment, enclosed by the darkness of shadow. 

The tanks were constructed for oil storage when the  building was a power station. The subterranean spaces are everything that a gallery with windows looking out to Millennium Park in Chicago are not. While Giacometti's figures are often surrounded by windows to accentuate their motion, in the underground world of the Blatnavik building, it is their stasis, their inward reflection and contemplation on their incarceration that is emphasised, making their weakness all the more apparent. This is a masterful instance of curation. 

James McNeill Whistler @ Tate Britain

 

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver, Chelsea, 1871

As to be expected, the highlight of the Whistler exhibition at Tate Britain is the room devoted to the Nocturnes. It is a rare treat to see so many in one room, together reflecting and meditating on the River Thames, soaked in industrial life in the 1870s. They are breathtaking. I believe that the Nocturnes set Whistler apart from all other painters of his time. His courage to paint these radical, almost abstract visions of industrial London, their haunting contemplation so at odds with how others were looking at industrial modernity. Peaceful, serene, at a moment in the day when light is ephemeral, gone in a split second, there is nothing in Whistler's paintings of the modern life so often painted by others in this period. Subject matter aside, what makes the Nocturnes  radical and unique is their technique. At the time, the thin, whisper-like watery paint was considered outrageous. Whistler's paintings were unfinished, some said. But the scraped away, thinned out paint on unprimed canvases is what enabled Whistler to capture the very special light of this time of day. The Nocturnes, together in one room, literally glow in their quiet meditative vision of what painting can do but had not yet dared. 

James MacNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Cremorne Lightrs, 1872

Another delightful element of the exhibition were the drawings and pastels and watercolours that Whistler did as he travelled from city to city, many of which I had not seen before. In his later years, after he had been rejected by the art world, Whistler was interested in cities built around water - London, Amsterdam, and of course, Venice. Paris in the earlier years of his career was filled with the hustle and bustle of daily life in the backstreets, the medieval parts of the city. But the most exquisite drawings were those that captured the reflections of light on water moving, lapping, and trundling around buildings in Venice and Amsterdam.

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver, The Lagoon, Venice, 1879-80

Whistler began scraping and rubbing and distressing the canvas very early in his career. His various techniques of pulling paint off a canvas rather than layering it on are evidenced in some of his earlier full length portraits. The scraped away areas on the canvas are in abundance, directing the viewer's attention to the face, or to the mood created in paint, away from any emphasis on story or character. Whistler's works are about air and light and "breath on the surface of a pane of glass" to quote him. They are not character studies or narrative paintings. Whistler wanted to do something that was only acheiveable through paint, using paint in a new way to create mood, the elements, and times of day. Of course, there was no question that this would bring with it the visibility of the canvas weave. No wonder critics such as John Ruskin were up in arms: Whistler was an outlier, and eventually, cast out for his innovation. 

James McNeill Whistler, Symphony in White no. 2, 1864

James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Black, 1882-86

I was disappointed - perhaps predictably - with the lack of mention of his repeated use of greys and greens, and the falling of figures' clothes into the background - even the white girl loses her definition to grey as her face melts in the mirror. Whistler was always striving for the musicality of colour - the ethereality of his painted canvas had to mimic the objectlessness of music. But so often this was only possible through his exploration of paint application and resonance, something best acheived through a radical use of greys, greens and their shadows.

James McNeill Whistler, Note in Pink and Brown, 1880

The exhibition also focused on the Japanese influence of Whistler's style and composition, shown through exhibition of prints by some of the Japanese masters such as Hiroshige. Whistler's radical flattening of the canvas is the most obvious result of this influence. His removal of the diagonal from the composition and created these very flat and lateral compositions in paint, chalk and pastel equally. In Amsterdam, for example, buildings dissolve into air, layers of life in their floors. Then when he begins to paint the Nocturnes the flatness, lack of perspective, and horizontality becomes the perfect strategy to represent air. While it might be smog filled, it is air, creating all but abstract spaces in which figuration is a shadow, a hint of a person. People and things were not important to Whistler, but always composition, colour., and the magic of translating the air into an image were what mattered most. 

James McNeill Whistler, Courtyard on Canal, Grey and Red, 1880

Ultimately, Whistler showed extraordinary uniqueness; still today, his work is singular in its technique and aesthetic. It is true that he was exploring similar issues to those of French painters of his time. For example, the fascination with daily life as seen in Manet's paintings, the capturing of light on the canvas of Monet. But he took it one step further thanks to the thinness of his paint and the push to full abstraction in the 1870s. It's difficult to overstate how radical that was.  Where cloth is all but indistinguishable from the background and cities are interesting for their patterns and reflections, not for the realism of the lives lived therein. What an inspiration he was, and remains today!

L'exposition générale @ Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

Installation Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain

After years of scaffolding and construction sheets covering the east side of the Place du Palais Royal, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain finally opened last October. Before upgrading from its digs on Boulevard Raspail, the Fondation had celebrated architect Jean Nouvel work his magic in a stunning renovation. Before thinking about the building, a few words on the exhibition.

Joan Mitchell, La Grande Vallée VI, 1994 and
Damien Hirst, Cherry Blossoms, 2020

The inaugural exhibition itself is vast and leaves little time for reflection as there are so many works. On display is a single work by each of the artists held in the Fondation collection. If not all the artists are represented, most are. Many people will be familiar with the works from past exhibitions at the Boulevard de Raspail gallery—a Damien Hirst Cherry tree painting, a Ron Mueck woman, a Sally Gabori abstract painting, Matthew Barney's Cremaster. There were also works that I had not seen before, for example, a wonderful selection of David Lynch's drawings, jottings, scribbles and scrawls. Some of them were clearly conception sketches for films—some very familiar shapes and ideas from Blue Velvet , Twin Peaks, Eraserhead—while others looked like reflective jottings made while on the telephone. It was a real treat to see Lynch's mind at work in the drawings.

Sarah Sze, Tracing Fallen Sky, 2020

Another work that fascinated my friend and colleague Oksana who joined me for the afternoon was Christian Boltanski's Ephémère (2017) in which linen cloths play and dance, inside moving fragments of projected light projected. As the cloth blows in the wind, light flickers and jumps, and then moving inside, it is like being inside an experimental film. Sarah Sze's installation, Tracing Fallen Sky (2020) was fascinating as it could be seen from above from a higher floor and below on its floor. In it, objects and monitors, and a model planet create a whole world that, in keeping with the innovative sight lines is also always moving. 

Christian Boltanski, Ephémères, 2017

The most exciting thing about visiting the new space was, however, discovering the building, its history, and Jean Nouvel's redesign. The building at 2, place du Palais Royal, was built in 1852 as a hotel to accommodate visitors to the 1855 Paris Exposition. By the 1880s, the ground floor shops had expanded to the point where they took over the entire building along rue de Rivoli. The Palladian architecture made for a grand bourgeoise building in the heart of Paris, showcasing the prosperity of the Second Empire of Napoleon III. As part of the renovation project of Barron Haussmann, the Grand Hotel du Louvre was designed as a luxurious symbol of developing industrialization and economic prosperity in the city.

Looking up and out

Jean Nouvel's redesign has maintained the symmetry and perspective of Palladio's interpretation of classical architecture and made it contemporary through introducing moving parts, reflections, windows onto the city offering unexpected perspectives. A walk around the vast building is filled with surprises and extraordinary perspectives. Particularly, looking up from lower floors at the building's arcade along rue de Rivoli, at times glimpsing the windows of the Louvre opposite, and at others, watching people pass was a wonderful sight. This is another paris museum for which visitors will spend a lot of time admiring the architecture as well as the art. But what is most noticeable, is how easy the space is. Big spaces (like the Louvre) can be exhausting to navigate, but at the Fondation Cartier, there was never any sense of being frazzled by other people. It is also large enough that there were very few people around and on a hot day, the chilly air conditioning made it relaxing and enjoyable.  I am looking forward to the Fondation Cartier's first exhibition, especially to see how they use the space to showcase their amazing collection. 

Tetsuya Ishida @ Gagosian Paris

Tetsuya Ishida, Recalled, 1998

Tetsuya Ishida paintings are filled with alienated young men, merging with machines, becoming them, dissected and packed in boxes, bodies trapped by buildings. The figures are tragic and yet, curiously identifiable. As the exhibition press release says, Ishida's style has a socialist realist tone and form, but at the same time, the figures fall into the surrealist nightmares of René Magritte. Most obviously the narratives reminded of Kafka's office workers consumed not always by institutions, but here, by machines, technology, and consumerism. 

Tetsuya Ishida, Convenience Store Mother and Child, 1996

One of the most disturbing aspects of Ishida's figures is that they are often sleeping, or catatonic, only ever active when limbs have become machine parts. Even then, the young men are comatose, at the will of the machine, everyday appliances, or architectural structures. Ishida's is a world in which human is no longer awake and machine has taken over. And worse, there is no attempt to challenge their colonisation. The young men and their machines also often occupy raked spaces, at times giving the impression that the figures are on their way to falling out of the painting. Otherwise, the spaces contribute to the surrealist tenor, suggesting that they are inside a staged performance, having lost all connection to authentic behaviour. 

Tetsuya Ishida, Gripe, 1997

While the paintings discourse on the alienation and mechanisation of daily life in urban 1990s Japan, anxiety and isolation brought about by economic decline and the so-called lost generation, their prescience of Western countries today is uncanny. Apparently, the paintings show predominantly Ishida's self image struggling with mental illness, alienation, and anxiety. However, the depressive mood and mechanical metamorphosis is easily identifiable to anyone working in a repetitive and repressive structural situations. The paintings show a world in which obedience and conformity are not negotiable, where the ability to negotiate has long been lost.

 

Tetsuya Ishida, Interview, 1998

Adding to these Kafkaesque nightmares is the common presence of animals in the paintings. Once again the young male figures are enveloped by animals, usually of the insect type: cockroaches, lizards, walruses, animals with claws and tusks made to trap a body. The disquieting proximity of these terrifying scenarios to our own existence aside, this exhibition is a great introduction to an artist who for me, and I imagine many others in Europe, was previously unknown.

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part @ Gagosian Paris

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part
Installation @ Gagosian

Blue is the colour of life and death in Sterling Ruby's sumptuous works seen through the window of Gagosian's rue de Castiglione space. Multi-media collages in lazulite blue, furious scrawls, water stained paper, and the reminder of flowers blown in the wind fill the walls behind human-sized bronze sculptures  of dead flowers painted blue. The flowers are mostly sunflowers charred with their heads bowed, what semblance of leaves disfigured by the elements. All of the flowers are in couples, bound together at their bases. Alternatively, they look at each other, their "faces" turned inwards, admiring each other.

Sterling Ruby, Till Death Do Us Part
Installation @ Gagosian

The flowers are somewhere between life and death. As the exhibition title suggests and the blurb confirms, they are saying their wedding vows, till death us do part. Beyond the obvious references to the mayhem and turbulence of life, the richness (and expressiveness) of art through the use of blue, if we anthropomorphise the flowers, and the traces of life in the paper collages, these sculptures are overflowing with emotion. In them, we see agony, the love of flowers that are bound together, the fragility and transience of life, sadness at the anticipation of passing. We also witness an energy swirling around the sculptures, as they weather their surroundings with dignity.

Sterling Ruby, Ghosts (9181), 2026

In Ghosts (9181), winds with the intensity of hurricanes batter the page and the vulnerable flowers in the corner. It is as though they have disintegrated before the storm is over. In Ghosts (9182), the threat has been and gone across fields of blue scrawls, having ripped through and left its traces in the form of diluted colour. Here, the flowers have escaped the path of the extreme event, but they are not without mourning and loss of their petals. 

Sterling Ruby, Ghosts (9182), 2926

While the marriage of the mixed media collages and bronze sculptures is unique and the different media are intimately entwined, I couldn't help finding the dead sunflowers expressing the undulations of human life to be, if not derivative of Anselm Kiefer's, at least, something that Kiefer has already done. That said, the small group of works is - as always for Gagosian's installations - beautifully exhibited. The works are powerful, and being inside the space gives the feeling of being inside a much larger world, a feeling made possible by the range of emotions and the intensity of their differences. 

Calder. Rêver en équilibre @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Alexander Calder, Black Widow, 1948

The Alexander Calder exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton to mark the centenary of his arrival in France is glorious. The curation of the exhibition looks as effortless as the works themselves, and yet, to showcase their weightless, ethereality must have been as carefully determined as the engineering of the metal sculptures. The simplicity and fluency of these incredibly sophisticated mechanisms, evoking the dreamy and the equilibrium of the exhibition's title was breathtaking. 

Alexander Calder, The Brass Family, 1929

Calder's early works are playful and fantastic, while at the same time being deeply connected to everyday life in modernity. His focus on city life—the circus, the velodrome, and other activities of industrial modernity—shows his engagement with his historical moment and the new kinds of movement /motion /kineticism introduced to daily life thanks to the manufacture of metal and other forms of industrial production. In his early years, he was also working for a sports illustrated magazine, and the National Police Gazette where he was hired to produce drawings of the circus. However, even though he was in many ways required to engage with modern life, his turn to sculpture and performance in the circuses were entirely his invention. In them, other than the wonder of the constructions, we see his interest in movement, flying and ethereality. From early on, he also shows a fascination for the physicality of the body, even though the body is rendered as a void through twisted wire. 

Alexander Calder, Dispersed Objects with Brass Gong, 1948

Similarly, his use of wire for technical and creative innovation to explore scale and the formal possibilities of his circus and other sculptures is fascinating. Calder used these everyday materials in exciting ways, pushing them against themselves to create delicate forms that were everything the material was not. In these sculptures, metal and other industrial materials become delicate, made into perfectly balanced creatures that fly and somersault, dance and play musical instruments. From the very earliest work, we see that Calder's use of wire is like line in a drawing often very simple. But while the objects look effortless, their conception and making cannot have been easy. 

Alexander Calder Jewelry 

I am not usually a fan of exhibitions that include the work of other artists, however here, works by Picasso, Leger, Miro and Duchamp are effective. They show that Calder was not an outlier,  that his work was closely related to that of his contemporaries, particularly in their common pursuit to take art out of its two dimensional frame, to reflect modern life, and to escape its bourgeoise pretensions. In addition, the juxtaposition with well known contemporaries shows that Calder's art was serious - despite its playfulness - engaging with the concerns of the time. Abstraction, movement, form, bodies, circus, sports, mechanical movement were all the subjects of representation to show modernity in their midst. Calder's sculptures may look different from the work of others, but there are many similarities. There is also something akin to Man Ray's light machines - and his photographs of light - in search of abstraction without weight and material. 

Alexander Calder, Aztec Josephine Baker, 1976

As his sculpture develops, many of the works become as much about the shadow as the sculpture itself. We see this in portraits such as that of Josephine Baker. Moving around the wire sculptures, when we look at them from different angles, we see the representations making different faces and the bodies move. And like the later abstract sculptures, these works are also about shapes, form, moving in space, constant kinesis. One of Calder's great inventions was to take sculpture out of its verticality, typified by a dependence on pedestals. He hangs sculpture from ceilings, attaches it to walls. And then he shifts beyond painting and sculpture to make works about time, and works that exist through movement of wind and the energy in the air. In some of his most sophisticated sculptures such as, metal creates the sound of the air in a way that we would not otherwise be able to hear. 

Installation @ Fondation Louis Vuitton

Calder's works are also about unpredictability, a lack of control, and the creativity that comes with that lack of control. Because the works come alive when we are with them, in are presence, they transform, become different. These works are still and reflective, silent and dreamy, light, but they manage to be complex and contradictory. Monumental and invisible, making the atmosphere visible and audible. Always turning. Steel becomes completely whispy, itself an challenge their material. And yet, they occupy public space, even as they are ephemeral. Calder's feat is to create complex engineering structures, made to look like fabric blowing in the wind. 

Leonora Carrington @ Musée de Luxembourg

Leonora Carrington, Feeding the Table, 1959

The Leonora Carrington Exhibition at the Musée de Luxembourg is stunning. The curation, the paintings, the flow of the exhibition, all come together to show the extraordinary work of this exceptional artist. Carrington is not unknown to anyone in the art world, and neither is she a stranger to the discourse on surrealism. But she did not enjoy the renown of her friend Max Ernst, of course, because she was a woman.

Leonora Carrington, Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, 1975

The exhibition includes her early notebooks and drawings. From the age of ten Carrington was filling pages with magical and mythical creatures in wild and wonderful narratives. There's no doubt that she had the most extraordinary imagination that becomes developed into intricately detailed, brilliantly coloured stories in which creatures morph and diverge across canvases, all somehow speaking to the others.   

Leonora Carrington, Artes 110, 1944

The exhibition text emphasizes the ardent feminism of Carrington's work, propelled by her suffering at the abuse of her father and brother. Her paintings show both the domination of women in the scowling faces of evil men and fallen women as well as the empowering levitation of women escaping the real world. The paintings are filled with anger and remorse, magic tricks and Greek legends. But what is most astounding are the figures; long, lean, with skeletal hands and feet, often emphasized. It is not always immediately obvious - because masculine and feminine are not always distinct - that the paintings are about pain and suffering. They often have a whimsical, joyful, at times humorous streak to them, encouraging us to laugh and smile at their playfulness. 

Leonora Carrington, The Lovers, 1987

Throughout the oeuvre, we see animals as the face of humanity, keeping women company, offering a place to sit, sharing the experience, comforting.  A head becomes three animal heads, a bird perched on a cow, or a pig asleep in a corner delight us with their imaginative depictions. Alternatively, animals are given the role of humans where men are noticeably absent or threatening. Often there was so much going on in the paintings that the cuteness of the animals was only discovered in time. But animals are also there to protect Leonora if we assume that many of the women are indeed, representations of her. Rabbits, cats, birds and other animals encircle her, a duck and a reindeer are dinner guests in Grandma Moorhead's Aromatic Cuisine, and various animals are more than onlookers in The Lovers. While they animals can take centre stage, they also come along for the ride. Often. like the presence of animals, the most compelling part of a painting is not the one that takes up the most space. In The Temptation of St Antoine, for example, the women holding the dress of the queen are vivid in their individuality.

Leonora Carrington, The Temptation of Ste Antoine, 1945

Despite the fanciful imaginative worlds, there are also erudite references to the great traditions of past art. Two curious figures peering over the top of the wall watching the woman feeding a bird are clearly drawing on the putti, angels, and children watching scenes of battle, beheading, and ascension in the Renaissance. The colourful dresses if the women holding the queen's dress in The Temptation of Ste Antoine remind of explorations in the same period, when new colours were being made possible and wealthy patrons were eager to see their wealth on display. Or the narratives that run across her Mars Red Predella, clearly referencing the surreptitious narratives of the form in its classical iterations.

Leonora Carrington, Mars Red Predella, 1947

While there were plenty of wizards and witches and all manner of beings ready to attack, overall, there was such joy in the paintings. Carrington was a committed feminist, vociferously speaking out about the madness she experienced under male domination, and yet, as I say, the stories she tells are always playful and sometimes funny, and there were moments of real lightness. As I walked around the exhibition, I couldn't help lamenting that feminism and identity politics today seems to have lost this ability to find different registers of criticism.

Brion Gysin, Le dernier musée @ Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

Brion Gysin, Dreammachine, 1979

In his time, Brion Gysin was vital to the development of mid-century experiments in poetry, painting, and other media. The Musée d'art Moderne has staged a retrospective of Gysin who today looks like a marginal figure, backgrounded by the reputations of his contemporaries such as William Burroughs. It's difficult to know where to start the conversation about Gysin's work because he was so multifaceted as an artist. He worked in painting, photography, music, poetry. But no matter what medium he was working with, conceptually, he was driven by a desire to transcend. Gysin's constant striving for an art to exceed the material and institutional structures is palpable and admirable.

Brion Gysin, Magic Mushrooms, 1961

He had an early fascination with hieroglyphs, particularly in the form of Japanese and Arabic scripts. He saw these scripts, repeated, read from right to left, bottom to top, as a way of breaking out of familiar structures. In addition, he was drawn to their rhythm that he connected to a kind of unconscious expression, otherwise found in LSD tripping. When exploring a script as artistic figure, Gysin would always layer it with a grid, capturing the tension between structure and freedom, the physical and the transcendental. 

Brion Gysin, Naked Lunch, 1959

Another striking tension found in his work is that between the highly conceptual, thus intellectual, and a reach for a beyond. They are also visually abstract, and aesthetically beautiful, often with vibrant colours used to express highly intellectual ideas. Similarly, because there is no more to be seen up close than at a distance, the works tend to have an overall cohesion in spite of the methods of fragmentation that Gysin pursued. The exhibition emphasizes Gysin's contribution to and his work's resonance with Beat Poetry, particularly with the cutting up of written texts to create surrealist visual poetry. That said, rather than admiring his connections to the Beats, I was much more interested in the sheer breadth of his artistic pursuits, his ability to work in many different media, and to incorporate many different traditions and inspirations. Perhaps his interests were too broad and this is why he is posed as attractive for who he knew? 

Brion Gysin, Le dernier Musée, 1973

Among the highlights of the exhibition is Le dernier Musée, a series of photographs presented in thumbnail form taken from his window in rue Saint Martin as he watched the Pompidou Centre being built. The familiar structures and forms of the Pompidou centre echo the grids, squares and lines that preoccupied Gysin across his career. It is as though the architecture was itself influenced by his thinking. There was also something very nostalgic in these colourful contact sheets, as the images witness a moment, not just when the Pompidou was being built, but a turning point in the history and culture of the city. 

Brion Gysin and his Dreammachine, 1961
Perforated metal, electronic motor, light

It is also worth noting that because Brion Gysin is not as well known as some of the artists he influenced and those who were his inspiration, the retrospective at the Musée d'art Moderne was almost empty, while there was a long line to enter the Lee Miller in the adjacent galleries. Given the overcrowding of many of Paris's exhibitions, the slow and relaxed walk through this fascinating exhibition is a welcome respite. 

Normes Corps @ Palais de Tokyo

Cathy de Monchaux, Studio, Wounds, and Battles. Desire is the Reiteration of Hope, 2026 

I am always on the hunt for exhibitions without hoards of visitors and inspired by the promise of empty halls, I went to the Palais de Tokyo last Friday night.There is a large diversity of work on display throughout the building, loosely cohering around the theme of bodies on the margins. I was struck by how often the works challenged, reappropriated, or simply drew to attention the ways in which the design and construction of public space rarely pay attention to those who are not able bodied, or are without power in the social and cultural world. A lovely installation by Benoît Pieron, for example, sees street lights filled with confetti in liquid, reminding of snow globes. Rather than having lights guide our path or keep us safe in a dark street, Pieron's installation has us fascinated by the shimmering movement of the lint. A bench next to one of the light posts encourages us to look at, rather than, be guided by, light. Behaving in a way not prescribed by the organization of public space, Pieron challenges it through inversion.

Benoît Pieron, Vernis à Ombre, 2026
Installation View

Many of the works left no doubt that public space is commanded over by men. Among the exhibits is a film by Pauline Curnier Jardin and the Feel Good Cooperative made together with street workers during lockdown in the EUR quartier of Rome. Made to mark the "celebration" of Christopher Columbus's discovery of the United States La Colonne della Colombo shows sex workers in the quartier imagined by Mussolini to celebrate fascism. It was empowering to watch their appropriation of the space—which today is actually a quartier of ghettoization—to celebrate people who are otherwise downtrodden. In full costume, seemingly happy to perform for the camera, the street workers indulged both live and film audiences in a carnavalesque, thus subversive, romp filled with humour and wit.

Pauline Curnier Jardin, La Colonne della Colombo, 2023

Another striking film shows aging women in prison, communicating with each other, creating community through the walls, much to the chagrin of a young male guard. Qu'un sang Impure (2019) is clearly drawing on Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour (1950) as we see the women passing gum, exhaling smoke, and expressing desire through the walls. However, unlike Genet's film, neither the women nor the film are restrained. The arousal, masturbation, and ecstasy of women often assumed to be sexually barren, is full throttle and confronting. We do not see genitalia though there is explicit masturbation, leaving nothing to the imagination. It is, once again, refreshing and liberating to see people so often cast out by those who dictate cultural and social desire, ignoring the norms and conventions. 

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Qu'un sang Impure, 2019

For me, the most striking in the suite of exhibitions was Studio, Wounds, and Battles. Desire is the Reiteration of Hope by British born artist Cathy de Monchaux. Doing justice to the intricacy and vastness of her work is almost impossible. Unicorns and other mythical creatures, pregnant women, bodies wrapped in what might be bandages or simple cloths, tightly wound to imprison, immersed in forests of intricately formed landscapes, a snake with skin covered in mouths that could easily be mistaken for vaginas, and the fantasies continue. Each piece is meticulously hand made from wire, paper, plaster, leather, rubber, velvet, woven, tied, wrapped and studded. The sculptures are spellbinding, and we don't know whether to be amazed, repulsed, or to recoil from their intimacies. Also included in the display of her work is a room whose walls are filled with drawings, ideas, early works from her studio. In it, we find an artist taken up with a forthright argument about women, the environment, and the entrapment of both in history, culture, and the world that we live in. It was exciting to discover de Monchaux's impressive work. 

Cathy de Monchaux, Maud's Pink, 1999

This is only a taste of what is on display at the Palais de Tokyo in Normes Corps. What a breath of fresh air to be at the Palais de Tokyo, not only to see some interesting, some brilliant, some puzzling art. The quiet and all but empty halls of the Palais de Tokyo were sheer pleasure after battling through crowds at some of the major exhibitions around town. And in spite of the relative calm, the art was filled with an energy that filled me with inspiration. It was also delightful to see so many young people in the museum, not only looking at art, but chatting, relaxing, and also enjoying the peaceful and generative atmosphere. 

Matisse, 1941-1954 Grand Palais

Henri Matisse, Spray of Leaves, 1953

I imagine that most people will be familiar with the odd Matisse painting, even if they didn't know it before going to the exhibition. It's difficult to visit an exhibition of Matisse's late work without seeing the infinitely reproduced popular art that it has become. That said, there were many surprises, including that the most reproduced were those made in his final years, works that are as interesting or radical as some of the earlier abstract painting. In addition, as a big fan of his studio paintings, as well as his use of colour to explore space and perspective, there are many reasons to brave the crowds at the Grand Palais for this exhibition.

Henri Matisse, Le lanceur de couteaux, 1943/44

Towards the beginning of the period on display at the Grand Palais' exhibition, Matisse was exploring movement, shape, music, and reaching for a  pure visual form. The colours in these paintings and throughout were gorgeous. The purples and pinks, female figures, leaves and other natural growth floating through water were also sumptuous for their expression of movement and dance. Matisse discovered these forms quite early in his career, but it took time to develop them into abstract expressions.

Henri Matisse, Interior in Yellow, 1946

As I say, it was a treat to see the interior rooms in blue, yellow, and red together in one space. The studio interiors are among the most avant-garde of Matisse's work. In them, we see black lines, and the four sides of the frame used to flatten space as well as the canvas. Ultimately, in these works, space is unsettled, difficult to perceive, making it a challenge to comprehend the spatial logic. It's interesting to think of these works in relationship to Picasso's work of the same period in which he is uses painting to tell a narrative. In a similar, but very different foreshortening and stacking of space, Matisse simply plays with perception. In many of the interior studio paintings, there is a window, open or closed, that nevertheless does not extend the space beyond the room. Windows work to put any realist space on the same plane as the represented interior. Alternatively, the windows might be paintings, and in the famous Red Studio we know this to be the case. In many of the interior spaces, there is also often a woman sitting, but she is also marginalized, even to the point where her face is behind a plant. Thus, it is not the human in the image who is important, but how bodies are organized within space.

Henri Matisse, Nus bleus, 1952

Though the colourful cut outs by nature are most familiar from reproductions, it was fascinating to be with them thanks to their sheer size and grandeur. Even a work such as The Snail and The Sheaf (1953) which is on permanent display at Tate Modern was impressive when together with other works of its size, including the stained glass windows. The final room of the exhibition gathered together silhouette cutouts in blue, including the four Blue nudes. It was a breathtaking close the exhibition. Thanks to these exquisite images, the finsal two rooms were intimate and expressed the artist's innovation. Seeing Matisse return to his lifelong interest in movement, form, and the role of the female figure in the search for purity of expression was fascinating.

Henri Matisse, Grand Visage, 1952

Lastly, also impressive was Matisse's lifelong obsession to find this pure, unencumbered form of visual expression. His journey through paint, paper cut outs, charcoals, illustrated albums, stained glass windows, in search of some kind of transcendence was fascinating. The search extended to his interest in music, the connections between jazz and painting, of course, the freedom of jazz. He is quoted as stating that he was looking for  this liberation in the lines and shapes and the expression of movement in the large works. However, it's not always easy to see the search in what can appear to be more decorative (hence their reproduction. In dots and stripes, grids and patterns, all disturbing space in the modernist paintings, the search is clearly identifiable.