In Caen, the Museum of Fine Arts opens a window on infinity with the exhibition “The endless horizon”
A mature man, holding a branch in bloom in one hand, passes from the other a ring on the finger of a young girl in front of the priest who unites them. The flowering of the branch means that it was he, among the descendants of David’s house, was chosen to be the husband of the one who will carry the Son of God.
The marriage of the Virgin, From Pérugin, opens the exhibition “The endless horizon” of the Museum of Fine Arts in Caen (Calvados). But if the wedding of Joseph and Marie are the main subject of the masterpiece of the Ombrian artist of the Quattrocento (Italian 15th century), the interest also lies in the spatial depth created by the composition of the painting. The spectator is like attracted by an invisible line at the height of the eyes. The most fascinating is that the said line moves according to what we observe … in the background stands a majestic octagonal temple pierced with open arcades letting our gaze escape towards the horizon in the distance.
Of the Renaissance – Singular Watercolor with tender chromatism of Albrecht Dürer – to the art of today with photos or installations, passing by the darkness Wavefrom Gustave Courbet (1869), the visitor crosses all eras. The first room devoted to ancient perspective treaties teaches, like the first theorist, the humanist Florentin Leon Battista Alberti, how to appear the distance in a painting.
But this geometric perspective promoted by Italians opposes the so -called atmospheric perspective practiced by northern painters. Rather than the construction of a pictorial space organized by lines fleeing towards the tip of an imaginary cone, the Flemish will prefer to make the idea of the distant by playing on the colors and by means of fluffy peaks – a gradient of pale blue to the horizon. Sometimes with aerial view long before the plane! Impressive Saint Christophe in this oil on wood attributed to Joachim Patinir and Quentin Metsys! The giant carrying the child-jesus vertiginously dominates the surrounding nature offering behind a panorama as the crow flies.
Initiation
Thus parade the canvases deploying a sky as far as the eye can see as among the romantics with this Mountain landscape At the lead mine and the brown wash of Caspar David Friedrich, this blurred dawn of the German contemporary Gerhard Richter. Or, on the contrary, reduced to a thin strip above the immensity of the water, in The escape of Rochefort by Édouard Manet. Light at the end of the tunnel? In the sublime vertical drawing with a brush and ink of the Belgian symbolist Léon Spilliaert, the sky seems to be the destination of the Ostend dike which winds upwards.
Contemplation becomes meditation. It is a course that is both aesthetic and initiatory offered by the commissioners of the Norman exhibition, Emmanuelle Delapierre and Céline Découcheux, who bring, through the beauty of art, to a deep reflection. We understand how paradoxical the horizon is. The more we advance and the more it backs up. Our gaze is sucked in by him although he escapes us.
Windows on nature or the sea, and beyond (a video of Capucine Vever takes us into space), these chosen works open a perspective literally and figuratively. In the self -portrait of Youssef Nabil, the Egyptian artist in exile was photographed from behind against a fantasized Nile, made of memories and dreams. “Endless Horizon” invites breathing, arousing an aspiration for another dimension. Grendy breath of air at the start of the school year!
