PARIS.- The exhibition Empyrean offers a profane and contemporary interpretation of the empyrean, the name given to the highest celestial sphere in both scientific and religious contexts.

From Dante’s Divine Comedy to Gustave Doré’s engravings, via Hieronymus Bosch’s polyptych Visions of the Hereafter, in art the empyrean has been the ultimate representation of the seat of divinity. These images are rare (are they so sacred as to be almost forbidden?) and yet they have one essential aspect in common: none of them attempt to capture the essence of the empyrean. Does it consist of light or fire, is it empty or full? Would it be complete darkness? Does this sphere have some actual astronomic reality or is this only a theological, symbolic reality? Artists are not bothered with the conceptual nature of the empyrean. In these representations, they are completely caught up contemplating the beings that find themselves there, these immobile terrestrial figures seen in a deeply meditative state, a state of pure contemplation. This is where a masterpiece like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog comes to mind and a possible definition makes itself felt.

From the moment the visitor enters the exhibition, Anish Kapoor’s Oriental Blue and Black Mist Satin (2019), an emblematic example of his tondos, plunges her into the heart of a vertiginous experience of colour and light, one bordering on the sublime.

Further on, the visitor is thrown up into the air by Ugo Rondinone’s humansky seven, exhibited for the first time in 2022 in the Scuola Grande San Giovanni Evangelista in Venice, a work which emphasises the symbiosis between the human figure and the celestial elements.

On the ground floor, an undated series of Polaroids by Nobuyoshi Araki appear like a daily attempt to capture his emotional state through a series of very personal photographs of the sky that he calls ‘shikū (I-sky)’.

Facing this, a photograph by Marie Bovo entitled Alumbrados, cielo amarillo (2004) tries to fix a rare chromatic light phenomenon— rarer than the aurora borealis—the yellow tone of a sunrise or a sunset.

In line with this effort to record is Gina Pane’s Souvenir enroulé d’un matin bleu (1969), a wooden roller covered in blue felt that has been attached to an aluminum structure and inscribed with the words: Ricordo avvolto di un mattino blu [Rolled-up memory of a blue morning]. The delicate colour of the felt and the evocative power of these words imbue the work with powerful poetic resonance. Gina Pane would later reveal in an interview that it is the blue ‘of the sky over the Piedmont mountains of my childhood’.

Daniel Buren is interested in the secrets of matter, working with both white Thassos marble—admired since antiquity for its immaculate tone—and Azul Bahia granite—known for its distinctive blue colour. Azul Bahia poli (Brésil) / Blanc Thasos (Grèce) - 15 lattes plays both with the languages of sculpture and painting, applying Buren’s visual tool of alternating 8.7-cm-wide stripes.

Alfredo Jaar reveals the words of the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, M’illumino d’immenso, with a piece in neon light that acts all at once like a mise en abyme and a mise en lumière.

At the end of the exhibition, which could be infinite, the visitor will be in a position to hazard a definition of the empyrean as well as of the artwork: neither exists except in being seen.