The Bourse de Commerce is drawing some one hundred works from the Pinault Collection to present the exhibition “Corps et âmes”, an exploration of representations of the body in contemporary art. From Auguste Rodin to Duane Hanson, Georg Baselitz to Ana Mendieta, David Hammons to Marlene Dumas, and Arthur Jafa to Ali Cherri, some forty artists have used painting, sculpture, photography, video, and drawing to explore the connections between body and soul.
“In the generative curves of the Bourse de Commerce, as an echo of the rondo of bodies that populate the vast, painted panorama encircling the building’s glass dome, the exhibition ‘Corps et âmes’ explores the significance of the body in contemporary thought through the works of some forty artists in the Pinault Collection. Freed from all mimetic constraints, the body — whether photographed, sculpted, drawn, filmed, or painted — does not cease to reinvent itself, thereby granting art an essential organic quality that allows it, like an umbilical cord, to take the pulse of the human body and soul.
Art seizes the energies and vital flows of our thoughts and inner lives to create a socially committed, humanist experience of otherness. Forms metamorphose, returning to figuration or freeing themselves from it, to grasp, hold on to, and allow the soul and consciousness to reveal themselves. It is no longer a matter of merely painting bodies, instead capturing the forces that run through them, to bring to light what is buried and invisible, and to open up the shadows. Arthur Jafa’s work in the Rotunda, Love is the Message, the Message is Death, transforms the space into a sounding board for the music and social commitment of African American icons such as Martin Luther King Jr, Jimi Hendrix, Barack Obama, and Beyoncé, thus granting them a universal scope.
His films, which oscillate between life and death, violence and transcendence, play out as a visual melody inspired by gospel, jazz, and black music. They form a flow of images and sounds that lend their beat to the entire exhibition, in a choreography in which the depicted bodies bear witness to the links between art and life. A rich musical programming in resonance with the exhibition makes ‘Corps et âmes’ a polyphonic event”.
