Drawing on a hundred works from the Pinault Collection—and, for the first time, several modernist pieces—, the exhibition "Clair-obscur" explores the legacy of chiaroscuro as it resonates in the present day. The Bourse de Commerce is transformed into a luminous and crepuscular landscape. Chiaroscuro thus emerges as a renewed visual and symbolic language, a narrative device, and a philosophical principle, expressing both the materi-
ality of light and the shadow areas of our unconscious.
“‘The contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not
its light but its darkness. All eras, for those who experience contemporariness, are obscure. The contemporary is precisely the person who knows how to see this obscurity, who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of the present’, wrote Giorgio Agamben. Drawing on the ideas of this Italian philosopher, the exhibition Clair-obscur transforms the spaces of the Bourse de Commerce into a landscape that is both luminous and crepuscular, in which some one hundred works from the Pinault Collection are revealed in an interplay of light and shadow.
Using this Italian philosopher’s thoughts as a starting point, the exhibition takes its
title from the famous technique of chiaroscuro that first emerged in Mannerist and Baroque paintings in the sixteenth century, most notably in the works of Caravaggio, who intensified its use, plunging the earthly world into a deep darkness penetrated by rays of light that heighten the sense of dramatic tension and the spiritual questions underlying his paintings. In continuation of this journey into the heart of darkness, Goya expressed all the darkness of humanity in his work, and the chiaroscuro he perfected continues to impact contemporary
works with its sense of depth and mystery."
