Between two lockdowns, galleries were able to take advantage of a brightening to welcome through their exhibitions, new audiences, who came to quench their thirst for art. Today, when they are again forced to close their doors, we make you discover an exhibition, in the hope of an opening soon. From January 20 to March 13, 2021, the exhibition After by artist Christian Boltanski took place in the heart of the Marian Goodman Gallery, located rue du Temple in Paris. One year after the retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Christian Boltanski gives us a reflection on the news of covid-19, in this solo exhibition. Back on the exhibition After which left no one indifferent.
The work of Christian Boltanski: at the heart of a childhood trauma
Born into a Jewish family, Christian Boltanski was born in 1944. From then on, his childhood was marked by a time when the anxiety-provoking climate of the post-war period. If he began by working sculpture and painting, he is now mainly known for his installations. The trauma of his childhood is at the heart of his large installations that tell a story. This narrative is mixed between old photographs, found or found objects, candles and string lights. In this play of light that establishes a link between his works, an obvious religious dimension emerges. Thus, the objects are akin to relics. The photographs, which re-invoke distant memories, evoke what the artist calls "individual mythology". In this perspective, Christian Boltanski focuses on creating a dialogue between individual – sometimes autobiographical – memory and the collective memory at the heart of history.
"We are surrounded by the departed who remain engraved in our memory and whose presence haunts me."
Christian Boltanski
The installation Monument: Les Enfants de Dijon, dated 1985, is one of his major works. Striking and moving, it consists of 153 photographic portraits illuminated by one or more bulbs connected to each other by a network of electrical wires. Generally exhibited in the dark, the work reminds us of Byzantine icons. From then on, the light metaphorizes a candle. Adapting to the typology of the place, the monumental installation encourages the viewer to create an intimate link. In this perspective, he addresses in his work not only memory, but also the unconscious, childhood, absence, presence and death.
After, an exhibition as total art
At the heart of the Marian Goodman Gallery, Christian Boltanski's exhibition After is structured across two floors. This exhibition presents a new set of sculptures, video projections and a large video installation as well as two other older installations. From the first room, the tone is set. Christian Boltanski takes us to the heart of an immaculate white room. Everything is white: the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the LEDs, the installation. Like a white cube, the color white blinds us. Indeed, it appears hostile, disturbing and aseptic, similar to a hospital. Sparsely occupying the center of the room, the installation Les Linges presents trolleys covered with a pile of cloths, and overhung by LEDs. In this same piece, Les Esprits (2020), projections of children's faces on the wall, seem to dialogue with the carts.
The rest of the exhibition leads us down to the lower level, passing in front of a mysterious video barely visible. We then discover the striking installation Les Disparus, (2020), in a room plunged into darkness. This installation unfolds over four large canvases on which videos are projected. At the back of the room, a light catches our eye. This blue light of the word Après (2016) leads us to enter a slightly more peaceful place where the installation Les Vitrines (1995) is located.
Through the common thread of light, the artist constructs a coherent narrative in a perfectly orchestrated scenography. A constant dialogue emerges between the works, the visitor and the space in which the exhibition takes place. In this sense, Après is an exhibition conceived as a total art that stimulates our conscious and unconscious perception.
An exhibition for "Not understanding, but feeling"
At the heart of Après, Christian Boltanski asks us to become one with each of the works presented in the exhibition. Always haunted by the theme of memory, he summons emotions and feelings through these spaces. Thus, on the ground floor, we interfere between the disordered and misshapen masses of white fabrics of the installation Les Linges. In this sense, this almost impossible wandering makes us lose our bearings of space and time. Some passages are narrow giving the impression of illegally entering this space that seems to be abandoned. Created during the first lockdown, the work dialogues between the different temporal strata, past and present, which become contemporary. This temporal float evokes a feeling "that something has happened". Thus, the work makes us venture towards an afterlife, slowly stirring like Proust's madeleine, memories, an atmosphere or a past experience.
In this perspective, against the tide with some contemporary artists, the artist seeks, not to make us understand a concept, but to make us feel the passage of time. And time passes invoking familiar everyday situations.
An exhibition on the border between life and death
In this total art, life tirelessly confronts death. The Linens , like hospital beds in which souls have disappeared, are both disturbing and stunning. These beds are overhung by LEDs, which, like fragile lines, metaphorize the lines of a vital signs monitor.
In flashes, we see on the walls the faces of smiling children who have become ghosts of the past. At first ghostly, these faces are drawn more and more distinctly. The Spirits show us fleeting images where an imminent drama seems to disturb this ephemeral happiness. Let us quote the words of the artist: "These are the ghosts that are linked to us, those that we remember and that appear on the walls. Since I've used these images several times before, these ghosts look more like mine, and at the bottom, they look like everyone's ghosts. »
At the heart of this exhibition After, the line between life and death becomes blurred. And this tangibility is at the heart of our news. Indeed, the artist explains that with the pandemic, death comes out of the shadows. From then on, desacralized death becomes banal, daily, through our exchanges and our images.
Work after work, the turmoil of memory
The theme of death appears in Christian Boltanski always through the prism of memory, stealthily, as evidenced by the video installation in the basement. Like a carousel, the installation projects rural images of undergrowth and deer, snowy forests, a sky of birds and blazing clouds, or magical images of sunsets over the ocean. These gentle and poetic visions contrast with these threatening images of the reality of memory. Pulsative and subliminal, they represent the faces of families decimated by deportation. From then on, the beauty of the world fails to bury the painful past, to erase this traumatic memory, which will never find peace.
In this sense, Christian Boltanski describes this installation as "clichéd videos of a fabricated vision of happiness [that] contain subliminal images of the horrors that took place during the century in which I was born and that unfolded in parallel with a part of my life […]. They remain present in the subconscious of most of us." It is therefore in the heart of an ambiguous silence conducive to contemplation that the horror of history continues to haunt us.
And, after that, what is left?
Once past The Disappeared, we confront the After. This light installation then echoes the retrospective Faire son Temps in which two installations were punctuated on either side of the route: Départ and Arrivée. At the heart of Christian Boltanski's interiority is the idea of a narrative journey that is both universal and personal, a journey that is not immune to the exhibition Après. After tension and chaos, a slight lull seems to emerge in the heart of this colorful light that floods the room. Like a last resting place, this ultra-violet installation does not represent an image or a thought, but just a state of light. Blue. Paradoxically, this promise of better days has the appearance of condemnation. For the artist, the past will always be inscribed in the present and the future. So the work silently asks the following question: what remains after?
In this perspective, the answer appears in the latest installation entitled Les Vitrines. Bathed in a yellow, almost solar light, the mirror, which faces the three coffins, reflects us back to our own reflection. The work is therefore addressed to us, forcing us to do a work of introspection. Becoming witnesses, we all carry within us the memory of the dead. Faced with our reflection, the answer is obvious. Passage after passage, only us will remain in the end. This is Christian Boltanski's message. "Someone once explained to me that in Shinto shrines, there is a series of passages from one room to another. And in the last room there is a mirror, which means that in the end, what do we see? We see only ourselves. »
A narrative of the After
To conclude, the exhibition After by Christian Boltanski invites the visitor in a total immersion to become one with the turmoil of our History. At the heart of a pandemic context, the exhibition highlights porous boundaries, between beauty and anguish, the conscious and the unconscious, life and death. Carried by light, the exhibition writes a narrative mixing the temporalities of the past, present and future. Through constant visual effects, images, words, works come to life to make us feel, as we pass, what we cannot always understand. Feel our existence.
