Looking at this diptych, which in its immensity offers a sensation of immersion in red, I realize that this emergence into red recalls the experience of the exhibition’s first rooms, and that the blue atmosphere from which we have just entered gives this red a particular, almost pulsing warmth. I notice that the photographs have clearly been inverted. They are not oriented in the direction of the landscape but extend upward. This singularity, usually associated with painting rather than photography, recalls Kandinsky’s famous statement that “A painting must be balanced in every sense, in every direction, in order to be a perfect painting.” Abstract Expressionism, which emerged in the 1940s–1950s in New York during its rivalry with Paris and with the work of Henri Michaux, introduced a new conception of painting: with Barnett Newman, Rothko and especially, for our diptych, Clyfford Still, a fracture opens within the pictorial field. Painting is not an image, but an event. The traces left by light on the camera sensor are similar to brushstrokes.Napex 223206

Sylvain Bellenger

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