PARIS.- Drawing on the works of a hundred works from the Pinault Collection—and, for the first time, several mod- ernist pieces—, the exhibition Clair-obscur explores the legacy of chiaroscuro1 as it resonates in the present day. The Bourse de Commerce has been transformed into a luminous and crepuscular landscape, offering visitors a sensory experience in which the visible meets the invisible. 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’,2 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, such as Sigmar Polke’s hallucination of a chapel, Axial Age (2005- 2007). Philippe Parreno, who reinterprets the black paintings of the Quinta del Sordo by candlelight, reminds us how much this alchemical cycle opened the floodgates of our modern sensibility. Chiaroscuro thus emerges as a renewed visual and symbolic language, a narrative device, and a philosophical principle. It expresses the materiality of light and the shadow areas of our subconscious, thus transforming our sense of the visible and the invisible. The influence of this pictorial sensibility is also palpable in the muted palette of Victor Man’s enigmatic, melancholy canvases—a series of which is featured in Gallery 3—and the highly poetic works of Bill Viola, which, inspired by the old masters, depict figures emerging from the shadows in slow motion.

Laura Lamiel has placed works in the twenty-four display cases in the Passage that harbour moods, atmospheric murmurs, and materialist chimeras. These pieces strive to give shape to the invisible and the volatile: memory, affects, emotions, and states of mind that she draws from the shadows and brings to life with light, as she says, ‘animatedly, as if I were working with brushes’. This carte blanche brings together a corpus of installations that have been envisioned specifically for this occasion. Light and colour play an essential role in this repertory of sensory forms that consist of found objects, collections, and taxonomies of materials that contrast with the immaculate surfaces of the steel that she lights with fluorescent tubes.

Beneath the museum’s zenithal dome, before it evaporates and makes room in the summer for Fujiko Nakaya’s fog piece, Pierre Huyghe’s Camata (2024) grounds itself in the circular stage of the Rotunda, which has been turned into a timeless amphitheatre. Within this space, the metaphysical ritual filmed by the artist in Chile’s immense Atacama Desert unfolds, a mediation in which mankind’s place within the universe—from night to day, shadow to light, earth to sky, ritual to cosmos, human to non-human—is reenacted ad infinitum”.—Emma Lavigne, curator of the exhibition


1. Chiaroscuro (clair-obscur in French, and “light-dark” in English) is a Renaissance artistic technique that uses a contrast of light and shadow to give images relief and depth. Popularized by Caravaggio in particular, it became a means of expressing artistic emotion that continues to influence media such as cinema and photography in the present day.

2. Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?” in What is an Apparatus?, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Redwood City, Stanford University Press, 2009.