With a selection of artworks by:
Valerio ADAMI / ART PRIMITIF (Togo) / Noboyushi ARAKI / Niki DE SAINT PHALLE / Jim DINE / Sam FRANCIS / GILBERT & GEORGES / Keith HARING + Baltasar LOBO / Aristide MAILLOL / André MASSON / Annette MESSAGER / Luzia SIMONS / Barthélémy TOGUO / Félix VALLOTTON / Andy WARHOL / Tom WESSELMANN
“You, you were more intimate than the intimacy found in myself”.
Saint Augustine
Saint Augustine was the first person to give intimacy a philosophical value. In this phrase, he raises two notions that are quite similar but which should nevertheless be differentiated: that of the intimate, a feeling that is personal to everyone and has developed over time, in tandem with the notion of the individual, and that of intimacy, an action of retreat or withdrawal, a desire to protect oneself from indiscreet looks, an ancestral act. Hence opposite notions such as the interior and the exterior, the private and the public, our intimate, the other, intimacy, which then becomes intimate, comes into play. These spheres seem to be defined by a social or a very personal feeling which induces questions of limits.
For this exhibition these notions, which are rich and paradoxical, deserve to be approached from several points of view. Niki de Saint Phalle, a creator of universes, invites us to enter them through the cavities of her Empress, a woman world. Holes that pierce bodies and the permeable intimate of the being, designed by Keith Haring. But these works also question the frontiers of these spheres; a geographical and cultural border for Barthélemy Toguo, who condemns the loss of identity through over exposition to too many extimacies; the frontier of the flesh, which moreover is exposed, by the nudity specific to the Island of the Rising by Baltasar Lobo, and does not deprive the being of its intimate. This then revealed would be even deeper, even unconscious, like in André Masson’s automatic drawing: fierce intimacy. We are then brought towards our limits, those of the world, in Light in Our Darkness by Gilbert and George. Then comes obscurity; that of the dead who by their state seem intimately linked to the alive whose fate also lurks then as the sculpture of the native art of Togo shows, the dead twin who accompanies the living all his life, those who swarm in the dark chimney of Valerio Adami who evokes the solitude of a bourgeois interior (Interno Borghese 1968). Then the light which reveals the abandoned body of La Paresse by Félix Vallotton, and who writes a scene of Shibari, the intimate foreigner to the western conscience the genius Araki who reveals his life to us. The work then appears to be a revelation of the artist’s intimate which continually loses and regains its status by going towards the extimate viewer, voyeur, in a continual movement, from oneself to the other, from the self to the self, intimately.
