Out of focus, another vision of art from 1945 to the present day

"In reality, we know nothing. Nothing precise. Nothing solid. We need to keep shifting viewpoints." (Grégoire Bouillier, Le Syndrome de l’Orangerie, 2024).

This is the same realisation that everyone has, the first time they find themselves before Claude Monet's Water Lilies. This exhibition explores this dimension of the painter's late work, the key to understanding an entire subsection of modern and contemporary art.
It was on the ruins of the post-Second World War period that the blurred aesthetic really took root and developed. The principle of discernment, which had long prevailed in art, now appeared profoundly redundant. Faced with the erosion of the certainties of the visible and the field of possibilities open to them, artists offered new approaches, making transience, disorder, incompleteness and doubt their focus... In response to profound upheavals in world order, they turned towards the indeterminate, the indistinct and the allusive. Their works free themselves from any injunction to be clear-cut, leaving greater room for the viewer's interpretation.
Inherently elusive, blurring invites us to step to one side, to pause our constant attempts to focus, and to explore reality in new ways. It became the preferred means of expression for artists in a world where visibility had become blurred and instability reigned, more than ever before.

The aesthetics of blurring existed long before the modern era. The Renaissance ‘sfumato’ technique, in which thin layers of transparent paint are superimposed to give the subject an imprecise outline, is a distant relative. The French term, ‘flou’, derived from the Latin ‘flavus’, first appeared in 1676 in the writings of the historian Félibien to express the softness of a painting. Such a notion qualifies the principle of representation based on clarity of the line. Impressionism signalled a turning point at the end of the 19th century, following the path blazed by William Turner’s paintings and their blurred compositions. Blurring would ultimately lead to the dissolution of the figure.
During this same period, the nascent medium of photography, essentially a mechanical process, was also rendering artists’ subjectivity through blurring. This affirmation of the artists’ vision is echoed in the Symbolist creations of their contemporaries. Exploring their inner selves, these artists employed blurring to reveal what clarity of vision normally conceals from our consciousness.
The works presented here evoke the different facets of this foundational period. Modern art already has its place here, in dialogue with the aqueous mirrors of Monet’s pond of Water Lilies.

The human mind works constantly to dispel blurring. Symptomatic of our unease in the face of an uncertain reality, the childhood question of “why?” has been replaced by “what is…?”. However, such urgency to give order to the world runs the risk of setting its meaning in stone. Blurring, on the other hand, draws on our experience, which is spread out over time, in the depths of the world.
Artists use blurring to question our modes of perception, suggesting that we go back to the source of our gaze, encouraging us to break away from an unequivocal reading of reality. They question the limits of perception, using the vocabulary of scientific imagery, from the vision of the infra-thin to the immensity of the cosmos (Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Thomas Ruff). They shake up the traditional reference points of representation, playing with indistinctness rather than the opposition between figuration and abstraction (Mark Rothko, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hans Hartung), visual acuity, echoing the circularity of the retina in their target-like works (Wojciech Fangor, Ugo Rondinone, Vincent Dulom).

It was in the aftermath of World War II that we truly saw the political dimension of the aesthetics of blurring unfold. Faced with the erosion of certainties, artists from Zoran Mušič to Gerhard Richter observed the profound upheaval in world order and seized on blurring as the required strategy.
Following the discovery of the concentration camps and the impossibility of representing the unrepresentable, blurring came to veil a reality that the eye could not sustain. And yet, the viewer must also try and focus, forced to linger on the image and stare reality in the face. Questioning the status and value of the image, these artists offer a vision that is both poetic and disenchanted with the tragedies that have marked the history of the 20th century, right up to the crises of today.
In this way, blurring reveals itself to be both a power of blindness, a mechanism for forgetting, and a way of bearing witness, in spite of everything, to the atrocities of History disseminated by the media image.

The world is a blur, no matter how hard we try to define its contours. Its expanses and durations are constantly being stretched out, making it impossible to focus on anything definitive, like the mirages captured by Bill Viola, which hint at the extent to which our senses can be deceived. Identity, too, is blurred and constantly changing, revealing all or some of its facets to others and to ourselves (Oscar Muñoz, Hervé Guibert, Bertrand Lavier). Between the uncertain memory of the past (Eva Nielsen) and the refusal of a frozen representation of the present (Mame-Diarra Niang), blurring becomes a quest for identity.
A product of technical naivety, but also a guarantee of spontaneity of the moment being captured, the blurring of amateur photography captures life where it is most real. It makes it possible to capture the most intimate locations, the ones that are hardest to describe, and in so doing, to show what often escapes the eye.
The disfiguring effects of this aesthetic sometimes reveal man’s animal side (Francis Bacon, Pipilotti Rist).

Hiroshi Sugimoto and Y.Z. Kami’s relationship with spirituality, approached through sacred places and gestures, offers one possible response to contemporary uncertainties. Captured during the lockdowns of 2020, Nan Goldin’s bouquet highlights the beauty and transience of everyday life in turmoil in a world losing its bearings.
The question of time, raised by Maarten Baas’ deceptive digital clock, or the unpredictable future foretold by Mircea Cantor, is exposed as an object of contemplation and existential interrogation. Paradoxically, blurring becomes both a symptom and a condition for re-enchantment, a sign of anxiety and a space for reinventing the possible.