Clair-obscur

On the occasion of the collective exhibition “Clair-obscur”, the Bourse de Commerce is transformed into a luminous and twilight landscape, where the works reveal themselves through a play of shadow and light across all the museum’s spaces. The exhibition, whose title is borrowed from the famous sixteenth-century chiaroscuro, shows how artists, from modern art to the present day, explore areas of darkness to shed light on the present.

Several modern artists presented in this exhibition revisit the legacy of the old masters, as seen in the dark and tormented figures of Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti, or Jean Dubuffet. Among contemporary artists, this exploration continues notably with Sigmar Polke and his “hallucinatory chapel,” Axial Age. It is also evident in the work of Philippe Parreno, who offers a sensitive reinterpretation of Goya’s La Quinta del Sordo paintings. Presented under the flickering light of a candle, these images seem to reconnect with their original intensity and revive the visionary power of this cycle.

From this perspective, chiaroscuro is no longer merely a visual effect: it becomes a true symbolic language. By juxtaposing light and shadow, it allows for the simultaneous expression of the materiality of the visible world and the darker areas of the unconscious. This sensibility is also evident in the “muted palette of the enigmatic and melancholic canvases” of Victor Man, or in Bill Viola’s video works, where, in slow motion, human figures gradually emerge from the darkness. Laura Lamiel, for her part, installs in the windows of the Passage a series of ensembles of objects and materials, composing small territories “in which states of mind, atmospheric rustlings or matterist chimera find their niche.”

Finally, under the museum’s dome, Pierre Huyghe’s installation Camata takes over the Rotunda, transformed into an amphitheater. It unfolds a filmed sequence in the Atacama Desert, Chile, inviting us “to meditate on the role of humanity within the universe – between night and day, shadow and light, earth and sky, ritual and cosmos, human and non-human – endlessly replayed.”

*Excerpts from the introduction by Emma Lavigne in the book Clair-obscur.