“We are living in a dark age. Well, it is up to everyone to get out of it, to open somewhere a door opening onto the possible glow of a vision where everything will be restored, as in the time of Giotto, the visible remains to be reinvented.
Philippe Forest, In Praise of Aplomb (2020)
Here is another of these enlightening exhibitions, non-literal, intelligent without being didactic, inviting without being prescriptive, another of these exhibitions combating the scolding discourse which dominates as much on the right as on the left, another of these exhibitions that knows how to do with elegance the gallery owner and curator Roger Bellemare, assisted by Christian Lambert. A poetic exhibition which will require attention and reflection from visitors, who will have to weave links between the works proposed, works which are often opaque at first glance. This is a radical position if ever there was one in an era where moral pranks most of the time give rise to transparent and mediocre works, supposedly of art, tartuffards, tart and insipid illustrations of falsely protesting ideas.
This exhibition entitled The blind will evoke the recurrent blindness of human beings to the problems of the world. Certainly. But, in a very beautiful twist, it above all invites us to explore blindness as an intellectual and artistic instrument… Because, ultimately, wouldn’t one have to be blind to perceive the world differently, to truly understand it outside of habits , conventions of seeing?
It is of course Arthur Rimbaud who is one of the references here, he who advocated a disruption of the senses in order to obtain dazzling clairvoyance, he who defended the figure of the clairvoyant artist… Among the quotes which punctuate the proposed route, you you will also find a sentence from this author. This police station will also not be without mentioning the exhibition Memories of the blindmounted by Jacques Derrida at the Louvre Museum in 1990. The French philosopher depicted the fact that to truly look at the world, you need a moment of blindness.
A presentation which therefore plays on this paradox, as with this silver print I am blind (1980) by Andy Warhol showing a blind man selling pencils, tools which will perhaps be used by artists to draw and show the world…
Bellemare and Lambert always know how to make discoveries and do not hesitate to juxtapose creations from very different eras. This in itself is not a revolution, but this attitude nevertheless remains a striking intellectual bias. Here, an unfinished print with evanescent forms by Rembrandt — The designer and his model (around 1647) — is placed next to a charcoal on canvas by Ozias Leduc — Storm landscape with rainbow (1914) —, a dark image signaling “the discoloration of a world in a war which would last four years (1914-1918)”.
You will find other very touching works there, such as this creation by the writer Michel Houellebecq, which shows an image of a desert space on which is inscribed the thought “We inhabit absence”. A way to remind us how we live in spaces haunted by our dead or by those we miss…
This thematic exhibition includes works by Roger Bellemare, who is also an artist. We will particularly note this wonderful photo of a woman, Evelyn Coburn, taken in 1987. We will also note Blackfeet (two elements) from 1986 by Marcel Lemyre, who was the assistant of Betty Goodwin, an artist who died very young, at 42 years old.
Unfortunately, it is through their absence that we measure what has left its mark on us.