FROM SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER 2021 - POMPIDOU CENTER, ORSAY MUSEUM, FRANCOIS MITTERRAND LIBRARY (BNF PARIS)

BNF Francois Mitterrand from 10/12/21 to 01/23/22 : GIUSEPPE PENONE

Imprint, memory, writing and trace

« By the 90’s, the obsession of imprint crosses Bernard Gast’s work : to perceive reality, to fix it or preferably to capture it through plastic mediums. Hence, we are invited to follow the tracks through multiple processes, to immerse in them : "The corridor of Sensations (1995) (Image 5 ) ; The translucent flesh of his x-rays or inner imprints (1994) ; footprints in the sand or ephemeral imprints of "The Hermit" (1994) ; his performance "Je est aussi l'Autre (I is also the other)" (1996) overlaping photographed faces on real faces as a virtual imprint of others ; "The large transparencies" (1998), imprints of landscapes as a challenge to the concept of imprint ; the dynamic installation of "The step machine" (1994) (Image 6), propelled by an engine and suspended... Which seems to counterweight the invention of his "Paintings with Movies" that he makes from films’ trailers kind of moving imprints becoming frozen fragments of motion... To become Paintings".

Guy van Baelinghen - Déprendre le voile (1987-1998) : Bernard Gast, in De l'empreinte des pas et des corps ou marcher sans courir - Editions GI

The italian artist Giuseppe Penone – one of the major figures of Arte Povera – also works with assistants. In 1990, I happen to work with one of her assistants who explains her part and how he connects the body with nature. In his magnificent work, « Verde del Bosco », Giuseppe Penone scrubs plants to draw on the canvas where a figure appears among the trees. Like Penone, I enjoy fixing a moment of presence (from nature, from my body or someone else’s body). In the same period, I imprint footprints outside on Parisian asphalt and elsewhere. As in «Nightwatch», footprints start from a golden square and spiral towards outside.

I realize the imprint of a friend’s body (Image 10 ci-dessous), in a 'participative' work in tribute to the anthropomorphies by Yves Klein and to the ‘Drippings’ by Jachson Pollock (Image 9 ci-dessous).

When I saw again Verde del Bosco by Giuseppe Penonoe at the BNF exhibit I thought of “The
absence” (2008), one of my “Paintings with cinema” that shows a composition of trees.

They are talking : Le Figaro, France Fineart, Les Soirées de Paris, France Culture

Thanks to
Marie Minssieux-Chamonard and Cécile Pocheau-Lesteven

MUSEUM OF ORSAY du 28/9/21 au 16/01/22 : FINALLY THE CINEMA!

Having invented in the 2000s the aesthetic concept of All of that is Cinema!, an exhibition called Finally Cinema!... It's a godsend, especially since its general commissioner Dominique Païni has analyzed certain tendencies of contemporary art (such as the work of Michael Snow or mine) to extract cinema from the movie theater to the museum (See Le Temps exposé - Cahiers du cinéma, collection Essais).

Cinema creates the modern spectator: a strong idea of the exhibition. The period between 1833 and 1907 matures all the urgency of the nascent cinematograph.

The Curator for Painting at the Musée d'Orsay, Paul Perrin, rightly connects Pygmalion and Cinema through the desire to represent life in the image. Like Pygmalion, I embraced Cinema's Galatea through a desire to embody Painting with the material of Cinema (35 mm film). My Galatea makes her cinema come to life in the form of a Painting-with-Cinema... Cinema animates life on the screen differently from what I create. Indeed, Painting with Cinema seeks less to capture movement in Painting than its spiritual dimension.

The Europe Bridge (Image 3 below) illustrates the emerging urban boom: a man watches the white smoke of a train unrolling a film of speed and movement. I relate this Painting by Gustave Caillebotte with Away from them ( Image 4 below) where the movement results from the composition of film pieces from a subway car. In this creation, I dream of Painting after Cinema... Cinema that has been so inspired by Painting.

Related topics: Museum of Orsay, Dominique Païni, Les Cahiers du Cinéma (The Cinema Notebooks), Philomag

Acknowledgments
Paul Perrin, Curator for Painting at the Musée d'Orsay
Marie Robert, Chief Curator for Photography and Cinema at the Musée d'Orsay
Collaborators: Jérôme Legrand, Philippe Mariot, and Lucile Pierret, Documentary Study Officers at the Musée d’Orsay
Leah Lehmbeck, Director of European Painting and Sculpture and American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Britt Salvesen, Director of the Department of Photography, Prints, and Drawings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Vanessa R. Schwartz, Professor, History and Art History, Director, Visual Studies Research Institute at the University of Southern California

POMPIDOU CENTER from 08/09 to 06/12/21 : GEORGIA O'KEEFFE

First recognized female artist in modern American art in the 1910s. Her work expresses the powerful character of an 'ancient Indian wisdom'. After mingling with the artistic avant-garde in New York, Georgia O'Keeffe isolates herself in the wilderness of New Mexico. While her painting in the early 1910s still evokes a survival of the American landscape school... By the 1950s, a certain minimalism is developing, which she anticipates.

Early represented by gallery 291, whose creator she marries, Alfred Stieglitz, her universe of plants and eroticism follows in an abstraction of close-up florals, shells, and bones. With the Mexican desert, her cosmic work seems to take on human form while simplifying.

The colorful abstraction of Evening Star No VI (Image 1 below) is juxtaposed here with a 'Painting with Cinema' where I play with the infinite space of moving red (See How much time is there left to wait?) (Image 2 below)

They are talking : Los Angeles Times, Centre Pompidou, Art à Genève, Connaissance des Arts, Singulart, La bouche à oreilles, L'officiel des spectacles, paperblog