Clair-obscur

The “Chiaroscuro” exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce gathers from March 4 to August 24, 2026 around 100 works from the Pinault Collection, including some modern pieces shown for the first time. The journey explores the legacy of chiaroscuro through paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations by about twenty artists. Heirs of Caravaggio and his dramatic use of shadow, the featured artists embrace the night to resist what Emma Lavigne, director general of the Pinault Collection and curator of the exhibition, identifies as the excess of light and false emotions of our age. From the darkness of the basement to the light of the upper floors, five thematic sections unfold as chapters where the visible confronts the invisible, from the digital reconstruction of Goya’s house to the algorithmic rituals of Pierre Huyghe.

Paintings on the edge of the visible and intimate, between the darkness of El Greco and contemporary vertigo Gallery 3, entirely dedicated to Victor Man (born 1974), creates an exhibition within the exhibition. The Romanian painter displays his canvases in a greenish gloom populated by specters and apparitions. His enigmatic figures play on contradictory forces between the everyday and the universal, pictorial seduction and obsession with death. Titiriteros (2023) revisits a famous subject by El Greco, Fabula (1580), whose religious or pagan meaning has faded through the centuries. 100 works from the Pinault Collection curated along the route Victor Man (born 1974), Titiriteros, 2023, oil on cardboard, 60 × 84 cm. The Spanish title evokes puppet masters pulling strings. Three figures lean around a glow in a twilight palette tinged with religious iconography and surrealist aesthetic. Victor Man’s paintings form a repertoire of fables, portraits, and contemporary vanities where seductive painting and the fear of nothingness coexist. Apparitions emerge from a greenish night traversed by Goya’s ghosts: Victor Man paints at the edge of the visible. In the Studio, in the basement, Philippe Parreno (born 1964) immerses the visitor in La Quinta del Sordo (2021): Goya’s “House of the Deaf” where the Spanish painter covered walls with monsters and witches, reborn here in 3D modeling. Low light, creaking floors, ghostly sounds—the black-box film surfaces the haunted figures of the Pinturas negras. The Auditorium extends this descent with Melted into the Sun (2024) by Saodat Ismailova (born 1981), a visual journey through the shadows of Uzbek ancestral memory where visible and invisible worlds merge.

Camata, Pierre Huyghe's algorithmic funerary ritual at the edge of Chile Beneath the zenithal dome of the Rotunda, Pierre Huyghe (born 1962) majestically presents Camata (2024), a conceptual superproduction filmed in the heart of Chile’s Atacama Desert, where the artist has his refuge. It all starts from a skeleton surfacing in the dry earth, discovered about ten years ago. Archaeologists dated it to ensure it wasn’t a political prisoner from the dictatorship: it turned out to be a miner from the early 20th century, probably lost while seeking his saltpeter mine. The Atacama Desert, the oldest and driest on the planet, is also home to the world’s largest telescopes. NASA uses it to test life-detection instruments for exoplanets. It is in this interstice between ground and cosmos that the skeleton rests at the work’s core. This skeleton long haunted Huyghe’s imagination before becoming the subject, or recipient, of a ritual from another time. A shamanic robot tends these bones left to sand and stars. Mechanical arms orchestrate enigmatic gestures: placing crystal balls, echoes of the Sun and Moon, strange bells, or some of the meteorites abundant in the desert, the atacamites. For Emma Lavigne, exhibition curator, this metaphysical ritual questions humanity's place at a moment when mankind seems to exist only residually, in an interstice between sky and earth. Pierre Huyghe (born 1962), Camata, 2024, robotics powered by machine learning, self-generated film edited in real time, sound, sensors The self-generated film reconfigures in real time through machine learning algorithms. Two articulated arms, powered by solar panels, delicately maneuver glass spheres and amulets around the body, performing a “symbolic and enigmatic exchange between the nonexistent and the departed.” Sensors in the projection space adjust image rhythms to visitor numbers, making every session unique. First presented at the “Liminal” exhibition at Punta della Dogana in Venice in 2024, Camata finds a new resonance beneath Bourse de Commerce’s dome, amplified by the Rotunda’s circular acoustics. From June onward, Fujiko Nakaya’s (born 1933) mist sculpture Cloud #07150 takes over in the Rotunda. A system of high-pressure pumps and rows of nozzles emit microdroplets identical to natural fog. The circular space fills with a dense white cloud where visitors appear and disappear.

Sigmar Polke's Axial Age: nine monumental panels between mythological figures and precious materials Around the Rotunda, amidst rustling and whispers, Laura Lamiel (born 1943) designed a series of site-specific installations for the historic display cases of the Passage, a twilight landscape that leads down to the 'Nocturne' section. In Gallery 2, Sigmar Polke's Axial Age (2005, 2007) forms a climax: nine monumental panels created for the 52nd Venice Biennale, whose shades of translucent bronze celebrate a golden age of humanity. Mythological figures and alchemical symbols emerge or fade with the light. The series draws inspiration from the 'axial age' theorized by philosopher Karl Jaspers: Antiquity, between 800 and 200 BCE, which represented a period of extraordinary spiritual vitality. Polke layers precious materials and photosensitive products—gold, silver, lapis lazuli, malachite—to create a living surface. Each canvas becomes an organic process where the dream of a golden age and the uncertainties of the present overlap. Sigmar Polke (1941–2010), Axial Age (detail), 2005, 2007, 9 panels, artificial resin, dry pigment on fabric, element: Deucalion's Flood, 2007, 480 × 900 cm James Lee Byars' (1932–1997) installations form a golden mausoleum in the same gallery. The Golden Tower (1974), a cylinder covered with gold leaf, rises like an axis connecting earth and sky. Byars is Elephant (1997), his final work created in Cairo shortly before his death, combines rope and golden fabric in a funerary staging. Between gilding and darkness, Gallery 2 composes a dialogue between material splendor and awareness of finitude.