Hans Hartung, T1982-H31, 1982
Miriam Cahn, Das Schöne Blau.
What if the out of focus, the blurry, the fuzzy was a better way to depict reality ? This is the paradox that the Musée de L’Orangerie, in the Tuileries garden in Paris, is exploring. The museum was built, in 1927, around Monet’s extraordinary Water Lilies paintings (Nympheas). These works are seen as precursors to a great many 20th Century artists and art works which immerse the viewer. However, when looking at these paintings, few were paying attention to the blurry colors of the water. Monet’s contemporaries believed the out-of-focus work was due to the artist’s vision problems he suffered from instead of seeing as a deliberate artistic choice.
Claude Monet, Le bassin aux nymphéas, Harmonie rose.
Today, Monet’s paintings appear to us as if announcing what was to come at the end of WW2. The realization that the sharp, in focus, bright representation of the outside world was maybe not the best way to describe the subtlety of life composed of out of focus zones, of sensitive components not easily described simply. There is more than meets the eye. The blurry operates also somewhat like meditation. Sometimes one needs to close one’s eyes to see an object clearly. The great Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto had been commissioned to photograph some of the great buildings of the last century. When he showed his work, the people who had commissioned it were shocked: each image was blurry ! Sugimito explained: “I captured the image of the building when it was still just an idea in the mind of the architect !”
In today’s chaotic world, where everything is constantly shifting, where uncertainty is the rule, artists often find that blurriness is a better transcription of the real. It describes more perfectly the “erosion of certainties”. “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…,” explain the show’s curators. “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 a symptom and a remedy of a world in search of meaning.”
After World War II, blurriness was used by artists to describe the indescribable. “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.” In this way, blurring is a more powerful way of presenting reality, forcing viewers to decipher the image in front of them.
In a world under constant surveillance - CCTV cameras, facial recognition software, digital cookies - where each millisecond of our lives is observed and analyzed, the blurry becomes a way to rebel against the permanent digital tracking of our lives. It is a break from the cold Cartesian stare. The blurry is a crack in the digital wall through which we can escape. It is also a way to re-enchant the world, to bring poetry and gentleness into our lives.
The exhibition demonstrates that the blurry is not new. “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.” Contemporary artists like Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Thomas Ruff, Mark Rothko, Hans Hartung have used this technique. With artists like Hiroshi Sugimoto, the blurry is also connected to the spiritual.
Gerhard Richter, September, 2005
The blurry, the soft, the gentle, becomes a sign of our contemporary anxieties, but also a way to escape and re-enchant the world.
~Jean-Sébastien Stehli
Dans le Flou. Une autre vision de l’art, de 1945 à nos jours. Musée de L’Orangerie. Until August 18.
Mame-Diarra Niang, Morphologie du Rêve #6
