Out of focus. Another vision of art, from 1945 to nowadays

This exhibition deliberately makes such blurriness a key that opens another interpretation of a whole area of modern and contemporary visual creation. Initially
defined as “loss of distinctness”, blurriness has shown itself to be the favourite means of expression in a world where instability reigns and visibility is clouded.
It was on the ruins left by the Second Word War that this out-of-focus aesthetic took root and began to deploy its inevitably political dimension. The Cartesian principle of discernment, which had prevailed in art for so long, now appeared altogether inoperative. With the erosion of visible certainties and in the face of the range of possibilities available to them as a result, artists came up with new approaches, shaping their works out of the transitory, disorder, movement, incompleteness and doubt… Taking note of a fundamental shift in the world order, they opted for the indeterminate, the indistinct and allusion. This distancing from naturalistic clarity went hand-in-hand with a quest for polysemy, expressed by
a permeability of mediums and more importance being assigned to the beholder’s interpretation. Instrument of sublimation as much as manifestation of a latent truth, blurriness became both symptom and remedy of a world in search of meaning.

Inherently elusive, the out-of-focus aesthetic took shape in distancing; not by direct opposition to the clinical objectivity of a world under high surveillance, but
rather as a balancing act in the gaps in reality; A distancing that does not result from rejection or denial of the world’s triviality but which explores its new mo-
dalities. At the borders of the visible, blurriness, while betraying instability, also creates the conditions for re-enchantment.

The exhibition itinerary is organised thematically rather than chronologically. An introductory room is devoted to the aesthetic roots of blurriness in the 19th and
turn of the 20th century, following on from the intellectual, scientific, societal and
artistic upheavals that impressionism grew up with. The exhibition is then organised in three sections combining paintings, videos and photographs. After an exploration of the limits of perception, “at the frontiers of the visible”, “the erosion of certainties” addresses blurriness from a historical and political perspective, examining questions of memory and status of images in relation to tragic episodes that have peppered our contemporary history. Yet the blurring of images goes beyond the collective aspect: there is something poetic, even dreamlike, about it when it touches upon the question of identity and “eulogises the indistinct”. An epilogue opens the discussion and examines the possibility of a re-enchantment of the world, in response to the artist Mircea Cantor’s tremulous assertion, “unpredictable future”.