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Earlier this year, after a day of
studio visits and an evening of gallery openings in Chelsea, I took
a short taxi ride up Eighth Avenue with Marcia Wood and the editor
of a New York-based art magazine. The back-seat conversation was,
of course, about art. Marcia mentioned that I was curating a summer
show for her gallery, and because we were nearing our destination,
I described it simply as “a meditation on visual pleasure.”
“Ah, beauty,” responded the editor.
“Isn’t it nice that we can talk about it again?” |
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Indeed, it’s hard not to gush.
There’s a renewed desire in contemporary art for the elements
that comprise formal ideas of beauty—harmony of order, pattern,
shape, texture and color—put together in ways that evoke feelings
of pleasure, maybe feelings of the spiritual as well. This may be
an old-fashioned notion, but it’s back. Beauty is the new beauty.
The work in Luxe, Calme et Volupté is unabashedly
beautiful. Appropriately for a show in this season, it is a summer
idyll, a visual bonheur. Each of the 15 artists here—13 individual
artists and an artmaking duo—have created works which, while
formally rigorous, are sensually complex, richly simple or simply
luscious. Consider the sumptuousness of David Ambrose’s textured
paintings on paper, opulent on their surface and, deeper, in the wholeness
of devotion they convey; the serene horizontals, rising and repeating,
of Rose Olson’s luminous paintings, metaphorical oceans or skies
distilled to their essence; or the polished marble sculptures of Venske
& Spänle, cool and white, as innocently personable as they
are slyly provocative. |
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“Luxe, calme et volupte”—luxury,
tranquility and pleasure—is the refrain in Charles Baudelaire’s
1857 poem, “L’Invitation
au Voyage.” In a celebration of life’s splendor,
the poet invites his beloved to travel with him to an imagined place
where the light is golden and the air perfumed, the language is
soft and secret, a place of order and beauty where all desires are
met, a world of luxury, tranquility and pleasure. It seemed the
perfect title for this show. |
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| I am not the first person
to borrow from Baudelaire. Matisse’s 1904-05 Luxe,
Calme et Volupté, in Fauvist colors and post-Pointillist
brushstrokes, depicts a different idyll, an afternoon of bathing
and sunning at the water’s edge in Saint-Tropez. Monsieur
Matisse’s paean to pleasure is intimate and seductive.
Much to my surprise, Luxe, Calme et Volupté,
the exhibition, has much in common with Luxe, Calme et Volupté,
the painting. Both share a radiance of palette, a fullness of forms
and a lushness of surface. Then, too, there is the repetition of
elements that generates a larger whole. Matisse created his composition
from the staccato swipe of a paint-laden brush, repeated again and
again. In this exhibition, the repetitions are in circles, in squares,
in pins amassed and ordered, in paper pierced repeatedly, in pixels
arranged, in paper layered and collaged and, yes, in the swipe of
a paint-laden brush, repeated again and again. |
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Henri Matisse, Luxe, Calme et Volupté
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris) |
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