PARIS.- Gagosian is presenting Critical Dictionary: In homage to G. Bataille, a group exhibition that takes its title from Georges Bataille’s deconstructive text and juxtaposes artworks of different time periods and styles.
For Bataille, words and images were subject to infinite conflicts and variations, transforming according to their use and context. While his Critical Dictionary (1929–30) explicates terms ranging from “materialism” to “spittle” through circuitous, free-associating paragraphs, the exhibition puts into question the hierarchies and chronologies of art history by grouping classical sculpture, postwar avant-garde painting, and key contemporary works. Focused primarily on the dialogue between sculpture and painting, the combinations reveal the ways in which proximity can confer new meaning on objects.
The exhibition includes works by Louise Bourgeois, Joe Bradley, Alberto Burri, Dan Flavin, Helen Frankenthaler, Duane Hanson, Donald Judd, Wassily Kandinsky, Anish Kapoor, René Magritte, Guido Reni, Paolo Schiavo, Frank Stella, and Mary Weatherford, as well as a tchitcheri sakwa, a clan shrine figure made in Togo circa 1900, and a Roman sculpture from the second century.
A dictionary should begin from the point when it is no longer concerned with the meaning but only with the use of words. Thus “formless” is not only an adjective with a certain meaning, but a term serving to deprecate, implying the general demand that everything should have a form. —Georges Bataille, 1929
DIALOGUE #1 UNKNOWN ARTIST | FRANK STELLA
This statue of a young man, carved in white marble, likely depicts the Greek god Apollo. The figure stands in contrapposto, its gaze cast downward, and its left leg leaning against a slender tree trunk, which serves to stabilize the work. Apollo—variously considered a god of music, truth, healing, light, and more—represents the ideal of beauty, and is usually shown with a lean, muscled body, long hair, and youthful features. This work was part of the collection of Roger Peyrefitte (1907–2000), a French diplomat, writer of bestselling novels, and avid defender of gay rights.
D. Scramble: Ascending Green Values/Ascending Spectrum is a quintessential example of Frank Stella’s Concentric Square paintings: geometric compositions that explore the interactions of color within a predetermined, regulated format. These works recall the repeated lines of Stella’s Black Paintings and incorporate the gradients of his Scramble works, which feature graduated color and value scales that alternate—or “scramble”—as concentric squares build outward from the center of the canvas. In the present work, gradually brightening hues of green are interspersed with squares of blue, yellow, orange, and red. The alternation creates an optical illusion in which the squares seem to pulse before the viewer, advancing and retreating simultaneously.
DIALOGUE #2 HANSON | MAGRITTE |KANDINSKY
In his hyperrealistic sculptures of working-class Americans, Duane Hanson eschewed the predominant expressionist and Minimalist concerns of the 1950s and 1960s, instead pursuing an unflinching investigation of the human condition. Hanson’s uncanny sculptural likenesses of blue-collar workers—repairmen, waitresses, and bricklayers, among others—resist the neutrality or objectivity often imposed by the exhibition space. Instead, small details such as strands of hair, wrinkles in the skin, textures of clothing, and facial expressions arouse strong emotions in the viewer, ranging from empathy to revulsion.
One of the leading Surrealists of the early twentieth century, René Magritte pushed the boundaries of selfknowledge, exploring the depths of the subconscious with a wry sense of humor. Painted in 1929, Le Démon de la Perversité (ou L’Ombre Monumentale) speaks to Magritte’s admiration of Edgar Allan Poe. Titled after Poe’s 1845 short story “The Imp of the Perverse,” the painting combines ambiguous forms and materials and sets them in an obscure landscape, eliciting sensations of curiosity and fear. A similar painting from 1927 is held in the collection of the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels.
As a professor at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, Wassily Kandinsky was particularly interested in the psychology of forms, as evinced by his own writings on color and line. Geometric elements and bold hues feature heavily in Kandinsky’s works of this period. In Dicht, simple shapes are juxtaposed over a muted, lilac ground, suggesting perspectival space if only to reject it, with forms, arcs, and angles floating up to the surface of the picture plane. In 1970, this work was included in the exhibition Wassily Kandinsky, Gemälde 1900–1944 at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, Germany.
DIALOGUE #3 DONALD JUDD | GUIDO RENI
In 1993, Donald Judd wrote an essay titled “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” in which he asserted that his use of color is just as important as his use of material and space— two aspects of his work that typically received the most critical attention. Beginning in the early 1960s, Judd increasingly used light cadmium red because he felt it showed the edges, lines, and textures of his forms better than other colors, such as black, which largely obscured those qualities. As with all of his sculptures, Judd did not give this work a title, allowing its solid presence to serve as its primary descriptor. The red color underscores the sculpture’s autonomy as an object in space, its “objecthood,” thus enhancing the viewer’s intellectual and physical experience.
Guido Reni, one of the dominant figures of the Bolognese school between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, addressed a wide range of religious, mythological, and allegorical subjects in his expertly painted works. Completed during Reni’s stay in Rome, Saint Jérôme displays the artist’s early admiration of Caravaggio. Saint Jerome is depicted as a penitent hermit, beating his breast with a stone to harden his spirit against temptations of the flesh. The expression and modeling of the figure, emerging from a dark background, is intensified by Reni’s use of chiaroscuro. The light seems to come from a source outside of the frame, evoking an unseen, divine presence, and drawing attention to the voluminous folds of Jerome’s red garment.
DIALOGUE #4 ANISH KAPOOR| PAOLO SCHIAVO
Anish Kapoor creates monumental sculptures in which he conflates the concave and convex, the inside and outside, the upright and inverted, translating geometric formulas into three dimensions. Minerals in rare hues and highly polished metals provide his anthropomorphic forms with an ineluctable opulence—vaguely familiar, yet maintaining a captivating ambiguity. In Chamber 3, a three-part rounded form is carved into a rectilinear block of alabaster. The smooth, hollow chamber is covered in gold leaf, suggesting an alchemical transformation.
Paolo di Stefano Badaloni, known as Paolo Schiavo, was a Florentine painter active during the fifteenth century. Madonna con Bambino in Trono, a devotional depiction of the Virgin and Christ, attests to the stylistic innovations of this period, from the pointed arch of the frame to the gold ground shimmering behind the figures. Characteristic of medieval painting, a gold background (also known as fondo oro) is one of the most visible legacies of Byzantine art in Western Europe. In the vocabulary of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century painting, gold stands for what cannot be represented: the unknown or the divine. This materialization of concept can be traced throughout art history, and is foundational tothe progression of modern abstraction.
DIALOGUE #5 TCHITCHERI SAKWA|JOE BRADLEY
Tchitcheri figures are ritual carvings made by the Moba people from northeastern Ghana and northwestern Togo. Tchitcherik Sakwa (sakab means “old men”) is the largest of the three tchitcheri categories and represents a Moba leader, believed to be planted in the ground by the clan’s founding ancestor. Their spiritual functions include ensuring family protection, good fortune, and prosperity.
In his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixedmedia works, Joe Bradley has produced a visual language that oscillates freely between personal and art historical reference. Constantly reinventing himself, he cycles through iconic modes of abstraction, investigating Minimalist questions of color and form, tapping into Abstract Expressionism’s spontaneous gestures, and creating cryptic signs and symbols in ingenious, lively drawings. In recent paintings, Bradley applies swaths of oil paint over fragments of unprimed canvas on the floor, imbuing abstraction with a refreshing tactile immediacy.
DIALOGUE #6 DAN FLAVIN | HELEN FRANKENTHALER
In the early 1960s, Dan Flavin’s interest in elementary forms and industrial materials led him to develop sitespecific arrangements of commercial fluorescent lights. Circumventing the limits of the gallery space and architecture, he used the standard lengths of the tube lights to set up nonhierarchical interrelationships, blurring distinctions between the aesthetics of art and industry. Shrugging off labels such as “Minimalist,” Flavin described his works as “sculptural proposals” and so developed a unique abstract language, without any trace of the artist’s hand.
A pacesetting figure within the second generation of postwar American artists, Helen Frankenthaler played a pivotal role in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Color Field painting. In her largescale paintings, she used a wide range of innovative techniques, famously pouring thinned paint directly onto unprimed canvas, which she spread out on the studio floor. Frankenthaler thus expanded the very possibilities of abstract painting, while subtly referencing figuration and landscape through her mastery of compositional space and gesture.
DIALOGUE # 7 LOUISE BOURGEOIS | ALBERTO BURRI
In her affecting multimedia oeuvre, Louise Bourgeois explored themes such as domesticity, death, sexuality, and the body. Tapping into subconscious fears and desires, she considered her artistic process a therapeutic escape from childhood memories, producing surrealistic and visceral sculptures inspired by her lived experience. Evoking a corporeal presence in abstract form, Cleavage places various opposites in tension: coarse and smooth, light and shadow, confinement and freedom. Several hollow channels allow light to enter the marble chamber, which holds a perfectly polished orb, a sort of all-seeing eye gleaming with its own guarded knowledge.
Alberto Burri allowed the detritus of warfare to inundate the relative sterility of postwar abstraction. After serving in the Italian military during World War II, as a physician on the front line, he turned to art as a way to sort through the devastation and trauma that he experienced firsthand. Incorporating tar, burlap bags, and household linens in his work, Burri emphasized the realities of material itself. His work departs from the painterly lyricism of his Abstract Expressionist and Art Informel contemporaries by communicating raw sensation not with brushstrokes, but through surfaces that bear marks, burns, and stains redolent of conflict. Rosso Plastica (1968) is from Burri’s Plastiche series, in which he experimented with the physical properties of plastic. In this work, three circular holes are burned into the red plastic surface, revealing a black, void-like background, and suggesting open wounds or geological shifts.
DIALOGUE #8 MARY WEATHERFORD | SOLINUS
Mary Weatherford’s paintings evoke specific times, locales, and temperatures. In her recent works, working neon lights are affixed to the canvases, complicating the legacy of gestural abstraction. Known for her overlapping fields of transparent color, Weatherford emphasizes the complex interactions between paint, lighting, and wiring, producing a hybrid form that collapses the distinction between painting and installation.
In an illuminated manuscript, the calligraphic text is enriched with gold leafing and decorative illustrations. This manuscript was illuminated by Cola Rapicano and likely transcribed by Giovanni Marco Cinico for Ferdinand I of Aragon, King of Naples, Italy (1423–1494). The text of the manuscript is the Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium (also known as the De mirabilibus mundi or Polyhistor) of Caius Julius Solinus. Extremely popular throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, it is a geographical catalogue of curiosities in the form of a history of the ancient world, borrowing from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia and Pomponius Mela’s De Situ Orbis. Each chapter of the manuscript is preceded by intricate white-vine initials of Florentine inspiration, yet rendered in Cola Repicano’s characteristic Neapolitan style.
