Clair-obscur

Next spring, the Bourse de Commerce will be transformed into a luminous, twilight landscape, where the works are revealed through a play of shadow and light throughout the museum’s spaces.

“The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness. All times are obscure for those who experience their contemporaneity. The contemporary is therefore he who knows how to see this darkness, who is able to write by dipping his pen into the darkness of the present.”¹

The group exhibition Clair-Obscur explores this reflection by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben through works by artists from the Pinault Collection who, from modern art to the present day, have turned away from the world’s artificial glitter in order to probe its shadowy zones.

To be contemporary, then, would mean receiving full in the face the beam of darkness that comes from one’s own time. The Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection is transformed into a luminous, twilight landscape, where the often immersive works are revealed through a play of shadow and light. In the circular stage of the Rotunda, transformed into a timeless amphitheatre, Camata, Pierre Huyghe’s masterpiece, takes root, unfolding a metaphysical ritual filmed by the artist in the vastness of the Atacama Desert in Chile.

The exhibition takes its title from the famous chiaroscuro that entered painting from the 16th century onward, through Mannerism and the Baroque age, as exemplified by the work of Caravaggio, who intensified its use. Its influence can be felt in the poetics of Bill Viola, who draws inspiration from the Old Masters to bring forth, in slowed-down temporality, bodies emerging from shadow. Painting—and indeed art as a whole—has never ceased to bring together shadow and light, with certain artists such as Goya whose legacy continues to suffuse the most contemporary creation with depth and mystery.

Chiaroscuro is therefore not merely a pictorial technique of the past, but a visual language that has crossed the centuries and is constantly renewed, revealing all the darkness within humanity and the world. It thus sets the tone for an entire strand of artistic creation, becoming a renewed visual and symbolic language, a narrative device, and a philosophical principle. It expresses both the materiality of light and the shadowy zones of the unconscious, transforming our relationship to the visible and the invisible.

List of artists

Frank Bowling (b. 1934)

James Lee Byars (1932–1997)

Bruce Conner (1933–2008)

Trisha Donnelly (b. 1974)

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985)

Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966)

Robert Gober (b. 1954)

Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962)

Saodat Ismailova (b. 1981)

Laura Lamiel (b. 1943)

Maria Martins (1894–1973)

Bruce Nauman (b. 1941)

Philippe Parreno (b. 1964)

Sigmar Polke (1941–2010)

Carol Rama (1918–2015)

Louis Soutter (1871–1942)

Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973)

Yves Tanguy (1900–1955)

Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968)

Bill Viola (1951–2024)

Danh Vo (b. 1975)

Mary Wigman (1886–1973)