Ténébr(o), Jérôme Poret — Avec Variations autour du ténébrisme et Wirken de Florence Giroud — Micro Onde — Centre d’art contemporain de l’Onde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 22 → March 20, 2011

No mere repertoire of representative techniques, tenebrism uses chiaroscuro (strong contrasts between light and dark affecting an entire artistic composition) as a dominant aesthetic device. Therefore, its range of expression is among the most complex in the history of art. When noting its resurgence in contemporary creation, we need to keep our minds wide open, without limiting tenebrism to a specific style, medium or form. It is this diversity of approaches found among exponents of tenebrism that is underscored at Micro-Onde, the centre for contemporary art at the Onde, a multi-arts complex in Vélizy-Villacoublay, through a personal exhibition by Jérôme Poret, an invitation extended to Florence Giroud for a three-part intervention at the Boîte, and a presentation of works in a variety of media by Sophie Auger. All of these offerings may be seen as variations on a single theme, giving visitors the opportunity to experience and learn more about this contemporary movement.

Ténébr(O), the personal exhibition by Jérôme Poret, presents a modern-day rendition of the Leçons de Ténèbres, the title of a number of works by 17th-century French composers based on the Old Testament text of the Lamentations of Jeremiah. Poret recaptures the dramatic impact of these works, in keeping with his modus operandi, which consists in “perceiving architecture as an amplifying structure conveying a given social and artistic environment”. Through a minimalist concept for the use of the exhibition venue, the artist reintroduces the classical components of this spectacle at the limit of the secular and the sacred (curtains, candles, lights, music) and reorchestrates a genuinely dramatic event encompassing the entire local space, both geographic and cultural (the arts centre, the town of Vélizy-Villacoublay). It is almost as if the concentric circles represented by the building, the town and their history found themselves united for the event in this venue to serve a tenebrist narrative, combining high and popular culture, immediate sense perception and intellectual exchange.

In response to an invitation by Jérôme Poret, Florence Giroud lays claim to the Boîte, an experimental exhibition space featuring the projects of young artists, and presents three works: a wall painting, a series of silk-screen prints and an installation. A single, nocturnal universe in black and white, in three facets, three movements in the same gesture, or perhaps three successive gestures, each offering the opportunity to explore the same aesthetic realm and communicate the same concern: our actions transform and perpetuate the world.

Counterposed against the enactment of tenebrist principles by Jérôme Poret and Florence Giroud, a presentation of drawings and paintings provides a sampling of other tenebrist approaches in contemporary creation. The works and artists presented happen to share a similar emotive force, an overall character, one able precisely to be endowed with meaning by accessing the imaginary and referential potential of darkness: Martine Aballéa, Gilles Berquet, Rebecca Bournigault, Karl Holmqvist, Mïrka Lugosi, Michael & Florian Quistrebert, Anne Laure Sacriste, Julien Sirjacq and Jean-Luc Verna. The works displayed invite us to consider whether the aesthetic quality of darkness is not really that of moral blackness and the macabre as we might be inclined to conclude far too rapidly, but rather the expression of a paradoxical clarity that would embrace its own romanticism, take note of its parallel meanings, while proclaiming that the boundary between the visible and the invisible is not so clear-cut as to be unmovable.