The group exhibition presented by the PACT gallery stems from a deliberate choice: to show works that address the future of painting, as well as its past. There is a reflective dimension to each artist’s work that explores the materiality of the artwork itself and its principles.

Thus, if we ask ourselves about the particular question of choice in art, we realise that it definitively and fundamentally influences the way it is practised and also, undoubtedly, the way it is received. Have artists always been free?

The best conduct themselves in a way that is first and foremost true to themselves, and which is rooted in history, even if they challenge that history. What the artist needs is a vision and an idea of art that underpins their activity and production. It is a question of reflecting on art. In this respect, Marcel Duchamp was a painter and an artist who instigated an exemplary radicalism in art.

In an interview with Marcel Duchamp in 1967, Philippe Collin made a clear implication in quoting André Breton: ‘A readymade is an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist’. He sought to place the readymade’s creator at odds with tradition, but Marcel Duchamp, being at the very heart of contemporary art, immediately and paradoxically positioned himself within the tradition: ‘But it’s always the artist’s choice. When you make even an ordinary painting, there is always a choice: you choose your colours, you choose your canvas, you choose the subject, you choose everything. A work of art is basically a choice’. It is not opposed to history, but rather integrates itself into it, with malice and intelligence.

The artists Andrew Grassie, Ethan Greenbaum, Katharina Grosse, Jean Nipon, Louise Lawler, Olivier Mosset, Peter Schuyff, Richard Pettibone and Yves Klein encompass a broad spectrum in the field of contemporary art. They have been brought together in this exhibition with the avowed aim of producing a shock and an unusual mutual dialogue for the visitors. What can such a heterogeneous and multi-faceted vision of art produce?

Ultimately, it is the question of image that is key in this exhibition. How can we think about our bodies? Fine or coarse? Whole or partial? Abstract or figurative? Monochrome or photographic? Ordinary or intriguing? Bizarre or burlesque? Serious or critical? Hybrid or reflective? Surface or skin? How to see it? And what if, furthermore, it was multiplied?

In Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film Persona, an utterly experimental cinematic masterpiece, the young boy, initially seen from the front, gently touches a membrane inside the image that represents the film’s canvas, which is then transformed into the image of two alternating female faces that he caresses one after the other, while we now see him from behind. At the beginning of the film, the director briefly goes through a summary of all the possible uses of filmic images. This exhibition proposes a similar discourse: thinking of the body of the painting as a film. Paul Valéry wrote: ‘the most profound thing about man is his skin’.

What painting celebrates, Merleau-Ponty tells us, is the enigma of vision. Between the different views offered by the exhibition, there is dialogue, discrepancy, opposition and telescoping. This is why the scenography deliberately places the pieces, all very different from one other, along a single line that can be read. The modest size of the pieces chosen allows for a linear reading of the series and requires the viewer to have a sharper eye.

This exhibition is presented as a visual alphabet that the viewer is required to decipher. Between these different views, the visitor must seek to understand a proliferation of meanings that emerge from the works and the relationships between them.

And it is no coincidence that a photograph, Ink/paint/pencil, by Louise Lawler is included in the series. It partially shows Sol LeWitt’s work in a space: two rooms photographed at ground level can be glimpsed. In her work, art becomes indexical. She captures, in an unconventional way, the place of art in its natural environment.

Olivier Mosset’s small 1988 painting from Keith Haring’s collection, measuring 35.6 x 31.1 cm, with seven unusually large vertical stripes of various colours, is a tribute to the Washington Color School, a movement founded by Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland in the 1950s, and a reminder of the Swiss artist’s connection to American painting. His work has the particularity of profoundly drawing on and dialoguing with the history of painting.

Yves Klein’s blue monochrome, IKB 275 (1960), pigment on canvas, lends colour an undeniable materiality and pre-eminence. In his painting, the colour radiates and embodies a form of concrete and porous spirituality.

Richard Pettibone’s untitled piece (1967), a silkscreen on canvas measuring 7 x 5.25 cm, appropriates Andy Warhol’s image of an electric chair by shrinking it, as the Jivaro Indians of the Amazon do with the heads of their fallen enemies. This reductive view of art is also a mise en abyme of Western culture. What is clear is that this shrinkage takes us far enough away from the artistic object to be able to grasp the cultural space to which it belongs.

In his painting Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez reduces human society to the foreground, occupying only half of the picture due to the height of the ceiling: this simple shrinking of the figures is a severe criticism of the importance attached to a person’s status in society, based on their social rank.

Jean Nipon offers a delicate and dense work made using coloured pencils. Entitled Olive Bataille (2022) and measuring 50 x 35 cm, it was created especially for this exhibition. The artist is fascinated by the masters of ancient painting, to whom he alludes in his drawings. In the portrait there is a partial reference in the background to the spears in Paolo Ucello’s The Battle of San Romano. The female comic strip character Olive appeared in 1919, later followed by a famous cartoon. Olive is courted by rivals Popeye and Brutus. The artist uses this iconic and comic image, making a portrait of it, which he associates with Italian painting.

Ethan Greenbaum’s 2019 work, Any, measuring 21,6 x 21,6 x 2 cm, is a hybrid, three-dimensional work deriving from a photograph taken by the New York artist during one of his wanderings through the city, which he transforms into a sculptural object.

Peter Schuyff’s painting Dutch Happy (2007), an oil on found canvas measuring 40 x 49.5 cm, shows the artist’s absolute freedom with respect to the subject and how it is portrayed, a huge smiley obscuring the face so only the eyes are visible, and also bears witness to his refusal to fit into one of art’s categories.

Scottish artist Andrew Grassie’s piece, entitled The Geffen (2014), made from tempera on board and measuring 12.5 x 19 cm, is based on a photograph, which serves as his model. The modesty of the work in progress that he captures, the image of a building site, is further reinforced because it is a momentarily abandoned place. The interruption of the work and the absence of human presence creates a diffuse feeling of desolation in the viewer contemplating the work. And its meticulous execution only serves to amplify this feeling.

In this exhibition, all these works, which are ensconced in an unusual and fleeting sequence, allow us to momentarily observe the life of painting and art, along with its curious projections. The world can only be glimpsed, and then we blink.

THE SYLPH

Nor seen nor known
I am the perfume
Alive, dead and gone
In the wind as it comes!

Nor seen nor known,
Genius or chance?
The moment I come
The task is done!

Nor read, nor devined?
To the keenest minds
What hints of allusions!

Nor seen nor known,
A bare breast glimpsedBetween gown and gown!

Charms, Paul Valéry

Victor Hugo Riego