Bertrand Lavier in Out of Focus
30 April—18 August 2025
Group exhibition at Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, France
Monet’s Water Lilies have long been viewed by artists and studied by historians as the paragon of abstract painting, a sensitive forerunner of the great immersive installations to come. However, the blurry, out-of-focus effect that characterises the wide stretches of water in Monet’s imposing canvases has been left largely unexamined. It did not escape his contemporaries, but they put it down to deterioration in his vision caused by an eye disease. These days, it seems more pertinent and fruitful to explore this aspect of Monet’s later work as an actual aesthetic choice, one that has been left to posterity to uncover.
This exhibition deliberately makes such blurriness a key that opens another interpretation of a whole area of modern and contemporary visual creation. Initially defined as “loss of distinctness”, blurriness has shown itself to be the favourite means of expression in a world where instability reigns and visibility is clouded. It was on the ruins left by the Second Word War that this out-of-focus aesthetic took root and began to deploy its inevitably political dimension. The Cartesian principle of discernment, which had prevailed in art for so long, now appeared altogether inoperative. 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… 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 symptom and remedy of a world in search of meaning.
Featured artists: Antoine d’Agata · Dove Allouche · Maarten Baas · Francis Bacon · Léa Belooussovitch · Christian Boltanski · Miriam Cahn · Julia Margaret Cameron · Mircea Cantor · Eugène Carrière · Claire Chesnier · Philippe Cognée · Nicolas Delprat · Vincent Dulom · Bracha L. Ettinger · Wojciech Fangor · Alberto Giacometti · Nan Goldin · Hervé Guibert · Hans Haacke · Joana Hadjithomas · Hans Hartung · Frères Henry · Alfredo Jaar · Khalil Joreige · Y.Z. Kami · Kikuji Kawada · Yves Klein · Bertrand Lavier · Thomas Lélu · Sébastien Lifschitz Collection · Albert Londe · Clémence Mauger · Claude Monet · Tania Mouraud · Edvard Munch · Óscar Muñoz · Zoran Mušič · Mame-Diarra Niang · Eva Nielsen · Albert Oehlen · Claudio Parmiggiani · Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza · Otto Piene · Sigmar Polke · Krzysztof Pruszkowski · Odilon Redon · Gerhard Richter · Pipilotti Rist · Auguste Rodin · Ugo Rondinone · Medardo Rosso · Mark Rothko · Thomas Ruff Georges Seurat · Edward Steichen · Christer Strömholm · Hiroshi Sugimoto · Laure Tiberghien · Daniel Turner · Joseph Mallord William Turner · Luc Tuymans · Bill Viola