Ryman's white abstractionism challenges the contemporary vision at an exhibition in Paris

Paris (France), Mar 1 (EFE) - (Camera: Raquel Fernández) The blank abstractism of American painter Robert Ryman (1930-2019) challenges the contemporary gaze in a new exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris, which puts at the center the artistic principles by which the artist was guided by space, material or light.

FOOTAGE OF THE PRESS PRESENTATION OF THE EXHIBITION 'ROBERT RYMAN. LE REGARD EN ACTE' AT THE MUSÉE DE LA ORANGERIE IN PARIS.

SOUNDBITES OF THE CURATOR OF THE EXHIBITION AND DIRECTOR OF THE MUSÉE DE LA ORANGERIE, CLAIRE BERNARDI.

TRANSLATION:

- Robert Ryman is an American painter who died 5 years ago. He died very recently and he is an artist who is already a little bit in the history of art, who is studied by art historians, who is studied by students, who is part of this post-World War II history and American Minimalism. And yet we don't know it very well, the general public doesn't know it at all.

- It is a work that seems difficult to understand, to enter into because it is a completely abstract work composed of a formula that is that of the white square. It could be said that we are at the gates of monochrome painting, we wonder how we are going to understand this painting. In fact, I think the key is to look at it, and that is what we wanted to do in the exhibition, to show that in the end, the painter was, above all, a painter. What he wanted was to experiment, to paint on surfaces, with materials, with different elements. And each time, what counted was the way he looked at the object, the support, the surface. So what we wanted was to create an exhibition in which the visitor's gaze was in action. It is an exhibition based on perception. Each work is different,

- Ryman left no plans for the exhibitions, but he did for each reinstallation of his works. There are works where you think it's very simple, just hang it on the wall, but you realize that you have to respect the hanging system, the distance to the wall, or to another work. So I would put little Post-It notes, little pieces of tape on the back of the work, sometimes to say, "Careful, this is up, this is down. Careful, you have to hang it like this and with this kind of tape or this kind of material, so we follow these instructions to the letter, but it is not a work of protocol, that is, the work exists, but it is reproduced every time in a different place and that is why you have to respect the way it has to be reproduced.

- It is the reflection of an exhibition curator, that is, trying to see how Ryman's work could be shown. It seemed to me that a chronological presentation did not make much sense, because throughout his life he tried to work on the same principles. And it is these great principles that we take up in the exhibition. So these words are the surface, sorry, the support, the space in which the work is seen, the material, and the light. And these great words, these great, great notions are the ones that really build his work. These are not words chosen at random, but words that allow him to emphasize what is most important to him, the essential components of his painting.

- He (Ryman) said that he was not an abstract painter, that he was a realist painter. It may sound provocative, but what he was saying was that he was working with reality, with real light, with real space, and with real materials. So yes, he is a realist.

- There are about fifty works in the exhibition. We have gathered 45 by Ryman to be precise and 3 works by Claude Monet that close the exhibition and show the way we can contemplate Monet's work after seeing Ryman.