A Snapshot of a Summer in Paris

By Millie Barker

Claude Monet, Reflets verts, The Water Lilies, 1914-1926, Oil on canvas.

Close-Up image courtesy of the author.

On a warm August evening I meandered through the Tuileries Gardens on the seemingly mandatory pilgrimage to see Monet’s Water Lilies at the Musee de l’Orangerie. The oval rooms were lined with expanses of dissolving colours and bold textured strokes that evoked the beauty of Monet’s garden. As a late session, the exhibit was less crowded than expected with some visitors sitting in the centre, quietly immersed in the canvases, while others crowded to take selfies. But my curiosity was peaked most by the exhibition downstairs.

Entitled ‘Out of Focus, Another Vision of Art from 1945 to the Present Day’, the curators drew from the blurry forms of Monet’s lilies to explore the creation of sight in succeeding works. The exhibition collated photographic works, paintings, and videos—seeking to understand the erosion of visual certainties and the embrace of the indistinct as artists sought to express the disorder and unrest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There were two pieces that particularly struck me. The first was by Christian Boltanski in the section ‘The Erosion of Certitudes’, a haunting photographic installation remembering Holocaust victims. In the aftermath of World War II, the discovery of the concentration camps and other tragedies brought for artists the impossibility of representing the unrepresentable. Boltanski confronts the viewer in his works, asking them to sit with the images of people who died during the Holocaust. His work stood out for its embodied blurriness, not as a mechanism for forgetting, but for bearing witness to tragedy. He plays with perception and memory to powerfully address how we interact with our history.

Mircea Cantor, Unpredictable Future, 2015, Lightbox.

Image courtesy of the author.

Second to this was Unpredictable Future (2015) by Mircea Cantor that addresses our need for transparency and predictability, and the value we place in certainty. This work, a picture of a steamed-up window with the artist’s finger tracing the title through the dripping rain, rejects such notion of certainty to instead capture the instability of our future. Cantor invites us to embrace the possibility of the unknown, and the balance of hope and anxiety within that. This piece hung at the exit to the exhibition, seemingly offering a moment of reflection for the spectator—inviting us, just as Monet did with his lilies, to find beauty in what is uncertain and revel in the opportunity it creates. This resonates with some of the words printed on the gallery wall; ‘a stable finished image cuts off the wings of the imagination’ (Gaston Bachelard, 1963).