At the Van Gogh Foundation in Arles, a variation around surpassing limits based on a quote from the Dutch artist.
For its new contemporary variation around Van Gogh, the Arlesian foundation is inspired by a beautiful and enigmatic phrase which has caused a lot of ink to flow. In a letter to his brother Théo, in March 1889, Vincent Van Gogh wrote: “Mr. Rey says that instead of eating enough and regularly, I mainly sustained myself with coffee and alcohol. I admit all this but it remains true that to reach the high yellow mark I I reached this summer, I had to step it up a bit.”
What color is it exactly? Art historians note the use of a particularly luminous chrome yellow. There is an infinite variety of yellows in Van Gogh's palette, from the light of cafe lamps to the yellow of sunburned wheat. But the formula goes beyond… Since Van Gogh, this “high note yellow” appears as an ideal to achieve, a moment of intensity, an experience of limits.
Overcoming realities
With a usual taste for zigzags and great sensitivity, curators Bice Curiger and Margaux Bonopera question this freedom, this expressiveness, this perception of the world inspired by going beyond reality. “These artists voluntarily expose themselves to emotional impulses”writes Bice Curiger. When VALIE EXPORT leaps for joy, in her freedom, she touches this “high note yellow”. In dazzling fluorescent plastic, Richard Artschweger's exclamation point sums up this quest with a simple, spectacular and definitive visual effect.
Everyone can then search for their own “high note yellow” in this walk. Undeniably, it resonates deafeningly in a room where the abstract expressionism of Martha Jungwirth rubs shoulders with the transformations of canvases purchased at flea markets by Asger Jorn, the overwhelming Arch of hysteria by Louise Bourgeois or a large triptych by Albert Oehlen!
Expressionism or yéyés icons
But it can appear without us expecting it, for example in the phosphorescent paintings of yéyé icons by Nina Childress, in the abstract illusions of Pierre Schwerzmann, in the automatic gestures of Vittorio Brodmann where bursts of memories, flat areas mix. colorful, surrealist figurations or in the free, spontaneous, disturbing paintings of Martin Disler…
In this personal research, the pure color of Verena Loewensberg, a rare woman to explore concrete art, vibrates to a musical rhythm. Hyun-Sook Song rediscovers the old technique of tempera for large abstract and meditative formats, born in the breath of a breath in the style of calligraphers. But we can find this intensity in a work by Pipilotti Rist evoking the clips of the 80s, the choreographed and mythological video Rival by Thomias Radin, the funny and monstrous lines of Klaudia Shifferle's sewing machine drawings or the kitsch and artificial dreams of paradise beaches by Karen Kilimnik.
A Van Gogh canvas painted in Saint-Rémy
And if this “high note yellow” inspired daily life? No need to paint! This is perhaps what guided the Provençal figure of Paul Blanchet, alias Le Sauvage, who began his eccentricities for the first Mardi Gras of the 20th century and lived refusing any form of hierarchy in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, the place of Van Gogh's internment. It was in this asylum in the Alpilles that he painted in September 1889 the sublime Field work, golden wheatpersonal rereading of a painting by his master Millet on loan from the Amsterdam museum.
But this intensity can also be interior, immaterial, invisible. The exhibition ends with Bruno Jakob who works with air, water, breath, pain, sweat or brain waves…
