https://youtu.be/IvpNpXftP38 Not retinal art The 20th century will be defined as the period when art was completely called into question. It was Marcel Duchamp who proclaimed, very early on and contrary to what people had hitherto...
Douglas Gordon and Alberto Giacometti: elective affinities with a ghost
https://youtu.be/m4zh9NOUhzc After Zidane How do you exist in relation to Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) when you make sculpture? The Scottish artist Douglas Gordon (born in 1966), former Turner Prize laureate and co-author with Philippe...
Arthur Jafa: the largest exhibition on the American artist has opened in Arles at the Luma Foundation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59UEnXYLGNc Love was the message For an artist, producing a recognized masterpiece means being immediately put on the global map of the art world. In 2016 Arthur Jafa (born in 1960) created an extraordinary film...
Julie Mehretu: “the power of the blurred image” in her new paintings following her retrospective at the Whitney Museum
https://youtu.be/vf-yRayDV-Y Incomprehensible words The relative danger of contemporary abstraction made by famous artists is that it engenders among art critics an outpouring of words that are most certainly lyrical, but also...
Xinyi Cheng: when attitudes become colours, at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris
https://youtu.be/wHFpfwlMM7w Harald Szeemann “When attitudes become forms.” In 1969 the great exhibition curator Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) came up with this expression as a title for an exhibition on the actions of artists, their...
Maryan: the forgotten Polish artist’s “truth-paintings” at Moca in Miami and Kamel Mennour in Paris
https://youtu.be/tqRrN8CRO_E Zeitgeist Success in art is quite often linked to an element that may be considered superficial, and which is described in all languages using a German word: the zeitgeist. For a very long time Pinchas Burstein,...
Palazzo Grassi, Venice: Drink in the paintings of Marlene Dumas
A punch in the stomach This exhibition is like a punch to the stomach. No taboos. No filters. Marlene Dumas (born in 1953) is like that. South Africa https://youtu.be/a-VOuV1POEA She lays herself bare and in doing so plunges you into a certain...
Mark Bradford: his breathtaking new series of paintings in Porto on the hunt of the unicorn
https://youtu.be/_3THFMe0qow Without paint For centuries, art was the result of an almost identical action: applying layers of paint with varying degrees of thickness to produce forms and create artworks. The American artist Mark Bradford has...
Michael Armitage in Madrid before Basel: beauty makes the social message even more powerful
https://youtu.be/PW4IZ8UlY70 Opulent It’s an opulent kind of painting. Contrasting and shimmering hues, shapes arranged in spirals seemingly the product of reflections or anamorphoses. And these blurred representations, which even seem to have...
Kunstmuseum in Basel: Louise Bourgeois augmented through the eyes of Jenny Holzer
https://youtu.be/5ZQQ5IQ-UQQ Before everyone else It’s not a good thing to be right before everyone else. The artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) whose work is haunted by themes of trauma and femininity only started to gain recognition in the...
Oscar Murillo: The artist whose paintings allow him to infiltrate the world
https://youtu.be/RVCU9Qd68gg Romanticism Artists can have a kind of 21st-century romanticism, if we can call it that, which means that some of them aren’t satisfied with recognition. They’ll call into question all the signs that bring them...
The cult of Marcel Proust: three exhibitions on the great writer known for his taste for memory and for shining a light on homosexuality
https://youtu.be/GukeCQhqTxI Paris memories Cities carry within them the memory of the filmmakers, painters and writers who have inhabited them. For they play a key role in their creation. Paris is one of those magical places that allows us to...