A rain soaked Wednesday? Relieve the gloom with a trip to the Pompidou Centre. More like relive the gloom. Seemingly slashed canvases depicting fractured angst and transcendent discord.
Well enough of the permanent exhibits. The temporary show caught my eye. Voids A Retrospective has been on just over a week.
It was a collection of exhibitions that - to cite the blurb - "presented a completely empty space, gallery, or museum".
There was Yves Klein's number from 1958. Lightly titled The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State Into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility.
Klein painted the gallery interior white to make "an ambiance, a genuine pictorial climate, and, therefore, an invisible one."
Apparently this show started the empty space as a work of art.
The other artists included Robert Barry, Robert Irwin, Laurie Parsons, Bethan Huws, Maria Eichhorn, Roman Ondák and Stanley Brouwn.
And they all had their take on the blank, white space.
Personally I've always liked the idea of emptiness being pregnant with meaning. But I was slightly befuddled about passing from white space to white space.
Fortunately there were arrows saying exhibition continues this way.
I really should have known there are whiter shades of pale. The boy certainly danced to this tune.
In Ondák's rendition More Silent Than Ever, the boy jumped out of his buggy and ran around it and me - a blur of motion. Oh the jauntiness of youth.
It seemed a trenchant summary on contemporary economic preoccupations.
I've always been impressed by a chapter in Sartre's Nausea. It went along the lines of: Nothing. Existed.
No matter how hard I've tried over the years I've never been able to connect with that kind of evacuation.
But since viewing the shoal of voids, I've been quite chirpy. Truly enwhitened.
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