During the fifty years since Picasso’s death, one of the museums dedicated to his work, the one in Paris, held an exhibition of Sophie Calle in tribute to the Spanish painter. The museum’s curators recommended seeing it in two visits, as it could take three hours, if not more. Calle adds many texts to his visual work that make you have to stop longer than normal to think about a work. This delay allows us to understand the deep autobiographical commitment to his work. It is clear that for Calle a thousand words are worth more than an image. To the point that it frames the text next to a box collage in which a viewer stands in front of an empty painting by Rembrandt. In another room he places a canvas with a text on it, as a curtain that has to be raised to see the frame. But first you have to read the text. This textual passion is observed in the ‘Catalog raisonné of the unfinished’ room, where he talks about his experience with Enrique Vila-Matas, who in one of his short stories Explorers of the Abyss, titled “Because She Didn’t Ask For It,” Calle is the broken protagonist who had to live her life as the lyrics indicated. Calle shows his ambitious challenges and leaves behind the redundant and banal attempts at so much autofiction that talentlessly plague contemporary art and literature.

At the same time, but in an exhibition running until April 2024, Paris is also hosting the Mark Rothko retrospective at the Louis Vuitton Foundation. Rothko is above good and evil, but I think he is closer to the 21st century, in the 20th century. The retrospective is perfectly balanced and shows the progress from his early figurative and urban years in ten rooms. It contains his emblematic painting Metro entrance, from 1938, which I found terrifying, a veritable descent into hell. Perhaps because the exhibition moves towards a progressive deformation of the next decade and that will end in his paintings without any figure, with two or three colors, which will occupy twenty years of chromatic radicalism until his death.

I had great expectations for this exhibition. I had hardly seen paintings by Rothko in other museums. The aforementioned mystical experience of Rothko’s contemplators was diluted for me into a slope towards death and nothingness, which ended with paintings painted directly in black. I insisted, taking a step back to walk through it again. I even wanted to attribute my disappointment to the overload of people overwhelming the retrospective. I didn’t notice anything except that their blurry monochromes won especially in the larger horizontal formats Red on maroon. But in reality, the roads to the absolute that John Golding talked about in his beautiful book of the same name – which also includes essays on Mondrian, Kandinsky, Pollock, Barret Newman or Still – are dead ends that can only be felt when they are standing in front of them , all photos above the pulsating theories of our time. Models of the Rothko Chapel in Houston were also on display. It was the depressing ending. Almost as if I didn’t want to see the walls with one Rothko painting after another endlessly repeated, I finally looked at the museum itself. I left Rothko and stopped at the spaces of Frank Gehry, to whom this building was entrusted in 2007 for the Louis Vuitton Foundation and opened to the public in 2014. It was like I came back to life. Located in the middle of the Acclimatization Garden, west of Paris, it is a gigantic, almost cubist, deconstructed whale, through which you can move as if invited to the adventure. Inside are visible the metal colonnades, a kind of tribute to those who climb through the bowels of the Eiffel Tower, but here many were covered with wooden slabs, and in each part small planters, and many windows to look through and through to look. surrounding forest, not to forget that the building itself is a forest of routes and visions. Although I knew Gehry’s other work, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, this is superior, with a plasticity that justifies visiting it even when there is no exhibition.

Among the surprising corners of Gehry’s building, underneath everything there is a small room, almost underground, Gallery 13, also called Open Space, where the Chinese artist Xie Lei exhibits. As the commotion continued through the Rothko Rooms, there was no one in the Open Space. Well, a security guard. I sat on the bench in the center and thought about the best I could see in these Parisian exhibitions: five paintings by this Chinese painter born in 1983, five oils on canvas from the series Au-dela (Past), where the silhouettes of human bodies drenched in a fleeting light are barely suggested among intense and gradual green and blue monochromes, amid a wild flora, as if in a process of transmigration, to which the title refers. Five canvases on two walls. On the third wall a distorting mirror that extends the chromatic vibrato. I took advantage of the silence. This work was not rich in rhetoric like that of Sophie Calle or in the mysticism of Rothko. The paintings spoke for themselves and did not speak of death, but of mutation and movement. Rothko has of course passed through Xie Lei’s eye, but the color has called for a vital shape, even if minimal. I trust that the curious reader will put the words “Au-delà” and the name of the Chinese painter into the Google image search engine to better understand what I hardly allude to.

I looked for Rothko and Sophie Calle and found Gehry and Xie Lei. The routes through contemporary art are always irregular, digressive, overestimated, unforeseen or placed on the margins. Sometimes ratification and recognition are sought. We must continue to discover those who speak without so much noise, even if we have to cut through the noise first. (OR)