Wolfgang Tillmans — Centre Pompidou
Dazzling, brilliant, and striking, the carte blanche granted to Wolfgang Tillmans in the cleared-out spaces of the Centre Pompidou’s Public Information Library is one of the most exquisite gifts you can give to all those who have spent their days here. In the vastness of a hall emptied of most of its furniture, the artist scatters hundreds of works—photographic, sonic, video, and interactive—to fuse them into a single, cohesive totality.
Wolfgang Tillmans — Rien ne nous y préparait − Tout nous y préparait @ Centre Georges Pompidou from June 13 to September 22. Learn more A kaleidoscopic plastic vertigo pays homage to the artist’s experimental dimension, drawing on technical modes to forge new relationships with the image, and in doing so, reflecting on the reading of time through its modes of representation. From the subtle selection of books still available on the library shelves to snippets of conversations on Instagram, from the very sequence of his works to the silences captured in the library, knowledge and communication are vectored through the images that carry them.
Boundless in inventiveness and unexpectedly rich, this vast exhibition transcends a simple monograph to become a gesture, a meeting of revelatory order. Tillmans, who has worked on this project for nearly three years, explores the world around us as much as the fundamental questions that traverse it. From the physical capturing of the image through particles of light to the recording of a gaze deep in research in the library, he weaves a link between the grand universal and the pure local event, composing a stateless globe of vision.
From what floats (astronomical observation) to what rubs (documenting alternative scenes), Wolfgang Tillmans has, for nearly forty years, mastered an imaginary of the unforeseen. Playing on the very fragility of a photographic medium perpetually in flux, he doubles the fleeting nature of a world in constant transformation. With its richly ambiguous title, Nothing Prepared Us for It, Everything Prepared Us for It, he grasps above all the logic of a postmodern society whose trajectory draws essential absurdity from its coherence, revealing the complexity of its archaisms in the obviousness of its forward escapes.
Yet by distilling into the framed objectivity of his images a practice and personal investment rather than a dogma, an engagement and ethics rather than an argument, he breathes unique life into each of his projects—resistant to any petrifying symbolism, they signal and make sense, even carrying within them an act of reconstruction through relationship with the other, mending his own fissures.
A major rigor that gives this presentation its full value and makes it uniquely exemplary. Departing from a chronological layout, the Centre Pompidou exhibition unfolds as a retrospective by affection, even by breach. We enter and exit his series, gliding freely through eras, yet compelled—more than with any other work—to verify the dates of each image. For while not clinging to the fantasy of an immemorial time, his photography seizes, within modernity, what endures and clings.
There is in Wolfgang Tillmans this insolent certainty: each of his photographs, in their starkness and spontaneity, accuracy and carefully calibrated deviation from symbolic recuperation, can serve as the starting point of an exhibition. Each opens, in a sense, to the possibility of a unique work. This coherence through fragmentation finds full meaning in a space like the BPI—steeped in history, featuring specific functions (some of which are lovingly preserved here), yet opportunely open to a free-flowing journey. We follow the scattered narrative threads that themselves embody this dispersive function.
And it becomes clear that with this exhibition, he opens a new dimension to his work. Beyond appropriating—as he has always done—a given space to reshape it through his images into a new architectural reality, it is here the visitor’s body, caught in the spiral of the work’s multiple dimensions, that finds itself interrogated at its own scale—a barometer for a quotidian spectacle that overwhelms.
His fragments become sedimented moments, breaking proportion to open to the incoherence of their model, engaging us in turn to shift toward one or another proposition. And to begin anew, incessantly. Reflective of this poetic use of an emptied library to resurrect the memory of a work which, in its complexity, already holds its own infinity of viewpoints.
By multiplying techniques and temporalities of spectacle—from the instant meeting of the image to the mirrored reflection of the Pompidou’s zenithal architecture—Tillmans plays with our attention, disrupts the logic of our concentration, forcing us, faced with overflow as well as apparent voids, to skip some elements in order to be more deeply imprinted by the next. But that void is never quite empty; it becomes populated with magical moments each visitor is free to invent.
A few yards from an emergency exit, behind a gallery wall whose reverse is only revealed by near touch, a photograph of a mouse escaping from a manhole confronts the pest traps of the Centre—far from mere illustration. A doubling through image that says everything about the continuous line connecting us to the world and its representation, seeing the artist seize—and entrust—us with the charge of the reality that surrounds us. So many micro-events, micro-represented through a printing process on a minute surface, rendered anew magnificent by their print and exhibition, documenting and cataloging, tracing their own mobility, the colossal wave of a reality that always surpasses us. A certain softness, but surely radical.
Like his photography, anchored in the everyday, using verticality as a plastic exercise. In dialogue with the building, Tillmans’s work—born of his own dialogue with architect Renzo Piano—exceeds the boundaries imposed by walls to bring it alive in its original modularity. Also taking advantage of an exceptional horizontal span, he makes the present lines dance by playing on color relationships, harsh angles as well as the most organic curves scattered through his images. From any starting point in the journey, everything seems truly drawn with the tip of a pen sharpened by retrospective glance. Beyond its conceptual weight, Nothing Prepared Us for It, Everything Prepared Us for It is above all a plastic spectacle, melding within its visual magnetism the core issues it carries, borne along by its transformation.
The Centre Pompidou’s last major exhibition before its closure, it stands as an experimental feat—a carousel of emotions and intuitions unprecedented in scope—unshackling the library’s ordering of knowledge to build a catalog of details and percepts that contribute to the experience of another form of knowing. The images are as many cuts of ideas and inventions, snapshots of a time that continues and lives on toward us—making ineluctably of his photography a counterside to the dictatorship of the event, leaning instead toward the possibility of an advent—each time anew—of an entire world: its past history as much as its passage into the future.
