It’s a Saturday morning and the sun is intermittently shining on Parisian streets. The leaves, resplendent in their may freshness, dapple grey pavements with the warm golden green if promised summer. I am going to the Pompidou.
I went to the Pompidou with a pal when I first moved here and it was absolute chaos. I had no idea what to do and where to go. This time, however, I just seemed to sail in like a ghost coming home. Effortless. Sliding up the escalator, through the lift, past the guards and in and up and full to a dead stop in front of a Matisse. There it was, the full tableau, a gorgeous thing in debs of red and orange and blue green lilac pinks and I just stood and looked at it for a while. It’s a funny thing, really, because whilst I love Matisse and I love this painting (Luxe, Calme et Volupté) I’m not sure that at first it was the painting I was soaking in. More the quiet somnolence of the space, the reflection of sound from the walls around me of captured conversation and rustles of coats and bags, and the muffled thud of heavy feet on hard wood floors. I had forgotten that it is as much the experience of being in the gallery space that I love, as the art. I like to people watch, and listen to people talk about what they’re looking at with each other. I think it’s one of the reasons I’d prefer to go alone, because otherwise I become part of the spectacle as opposed to a spectator. I am a quiet spectre drifting from work to work depending on what catches my eye, sometimes only looking at something because someone else is giving it an interesting eye and I want to know what they’re seeing there.
I love this Matisse, though. I love the little figure wrapped in a towel, and the hot cold sensation of the colour he’s used. The sensation of the women bathing becomes palpable through the paint. In walking a little closer to the frame I can see, captured therein, the brushstrokes that Matisse himself had made which close the gap in time between he and I. The space where he signed his name performing its gesture again. Matisse just signed it, is still signing it, will always be signing it. Different to a photograph of it, different to its recreations. Not that those are any less valuable, of course, I can just feel the gap between artist, work, and self close in those moments of recognition.
Who was it that bought a Michelangelo sketch and erased it? Someone did that, and for some reason I feel like that must have been the same feeling. Michelangelo didn’t stop drawing until the drawing was erased, because every time you look at it the pencil lines reperform the action of his hand. Anyway, that’s another story for another time.
The next work I found myself stopping in front of was Gino Severini’s La Danse du Pan Pan au Monaco. I think I sat in front of it for some time, not realising how much it would affect me to simply be there. I kept looking at brush strokes and feeling myself tear up a little, as though the last year and a half of not having engaged with art this way caught up with me all at once. It sounds stupid and sentimental. It feels stupid and sentimental tbh, it’s very much not usually my vibe.
Anyway, just look at this. Take ur time. I wish I could take u to the Pompidou to look at it actually, but just give it a minute. It looks messy and chaotic like this. Tbh I wish i could just describe them instead but I’m about to go to lunch with a pal so, needs must to get this done quickly. I’d zoom in on it if I were you. I can’t tell if they’re dancing, or fighting. Legs flailing everywhere, sombre faces sometimes caught by white tablecloths and flashes of fractured wine glasses; is this not the restos and bars pré confinement? Is this not what life looks like to the half drunk in the half light of the evening? It is to me! I look and everywhere I look I see the flash of an arm, or a wrist, of a face. Like my head is spinning. This was one of the other things, I think, that made me so emotional. Here, sequestered in their big tall buildings; monuments to art, to “high culture” I guess (which is in itself q problematic) have been these vestiges of a world that is in many ways, gone. Sure it’ll come back, but the lack of distance found in this, the visual representation of the Brouhaha of light flashing, of waitresses hands entering and exiting the scene holding full glasses and then empty. The whole thing a maelstrom of half captured image.
I couldn’t spend long in the Pompidou today. Firstly, for lunch plans with a friend, and secondly for the fact that I don’t have the stamina to absorb like I used to. Half way through the modern floor I was basically done. I will come back next weekend instead to see what I might find elsewhere. I am fully saturated, and I think it comes back to the whole point I made about the experience of gallery going being as much the art as the art itself. I was stimulated enough by coming in the building. A fully weird one.
I’ll end, then, on my favourite. A painting (or rather series of paintings, really) that I have come to see as much as humanly possible. A painting that puts life into me and takes out everything I don’t want. It’s IKB. In the Pompidou it’s IKB3 (at the Tate it’s IKB47). I’m going to include a picture here, but it just won’t make sense if you’ve never seen one in real life, but here it is anyway.
It’s a blue canvas. That’s it. But Yves Klein (the artist) created this colour himself. It’s Yves Klein Blue, and to me it is a colour so perfect, so boundless, that to see it is enough to make my heart stop. It seems to take in the light around it, absorb it, and then pulse it back out to you in waves. To squint at it makes you feel like you’re watching Derek Jarman’s Blue (though that makes sense bc blue is just a static picture of IKB47). I love to stand super close to it, and put my hands up around my eyes like makeshift binoculars. All I am is blue, all I see is blue, entering into the void of blue, becoming blue, leaving the gallery infested with it, inside outside upside down blue. Always.
I am so happy that everything is opening. I feel like if you cut me now I’d bleed IKB, not only because of the art, but because of how that single uninterrupted plane of blue truly explains how it feels to be exiting a state of being that, for me as it has been for many of us, simply about getting through it. It’s been tough getting through it. Looking at IKB I felt absolved of all of that toughness. I felt free.
Goose FM 