Brad Pitt's poetry The story could begin with a few poetic sentences from Brad Pitt: “He walks right by, though he doesn’t see (me)- Shapes and obsessions block his view. He disappears into his cavern, for yet another round. (…) What does it mean to lay oneself...
A certain tension A slight imbalance. Some kind of disturbance… Great artists don’t create unforgettable works by envisaging perfection so much as by establishing anomalies. Along with the exceptional jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, who wore large rings on all...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryiiCfs0ZlM A great country for art Qatar has become one of the great countries in the world for art. The capital, Doha, is marked from the airport to the desert by an extremely ambitious public art program, with a series...
Don't stop at the subject When Cézanne painted his wife or a still life of some apples he didn’t just stop at the subject: a portrait of an unprepossessing woman or fruit arranged on a table… He portrayed his universe, composing a union of colours and shapes to...
Bill Viola and video art A single exhibition is not enough to form a definitive opinion of an artist. The American artist Bill Viola (born in 1951) is known as one of the major figures and the great pioneer of video art. Yet his retrospective at the Grand...
Sharjah Do you know Sharjah? It’s a city in the United Arab Emirates that doesn’t get much media attention. While it may not be as bustling as Dubai with its ski run and flashy nightclubs, nor as moneyed as Abu Dhabi with its Louvre and its oil wells, Sharjah, a city...
The good Impressionnism The word “Impressionism” may be ringing in the ears of the twenty-first-century man like a deterrent. Some people no longer want the endless greenish landscapes of late Pissarros,even though the artist was the great theorist of the movement,...
Vanished Leonardo After a little over a year in existence and with over a million visitors, the Louvre Abu Dhabi has shown itself to be a force to be reckoned with in the museum world. To do so it wasn’t necessary to acquire an overly restored Leonardo da Vinci...
About colonialism The issues surrounding African tribal art have never been so pressing. This is because as time has passed and awareness has grown, people have realized the extent of the damage inflicted by the colonial project on culture in these countries, once...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGMgYcPkLvs Much has been said about the influence of the Japanese on modern art, from Degas to Van Gogh, to the extent that this phenomenon even has a name: Japanism. Much less has been said about the influence of modern...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdwEglW8EX8 On paper the Dau project doesn’t fail to amaze. This is the story of a Russian filmmaker who hasn’t filmed all that much, Ilya Khrzhanovsky (born in 1975), who is said to have succeeded in convincing a New Russian who...
Paul Cézanne father of all “Everything in nature is modelled on the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. One has to learn to paint from these simple shapes”. It’s 1904 and the artist writing these words, the Aix-born Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), has been doing a lot...