Thomas BERNARD
Les Nymphéas : Miroirs des profondeurs
2025
Surface as a Paradigm of Modernity
"The eyes sink as if into the swirls of deep waters," wrote Louis Gillet before the Water Lilies. This vertiginous plunge into Monet's work, which Georges Clemenceau saw as "a lesson in infinite peace," resonates today in a singular way. In the history of modern art, the Water Lilies occupy a unique position, where pictorial revolution and meditation on depths intersect. These monumental works, undertaken as Europe was sinking into the Great War, simultaneously mark the apotheosis of impressionism and its radical transcendence.
As Georges Didi-Huberman has shown in his analysis of "surfaces of depth," the image is never pure surface but always a stratification, where the visible and invisible intertwine. By abolishing the traditional horizon, Monet not only disrupts the codes of representation (1), he opens a mental space where, according to Gaston Bachelard's words, "the reverie of waters teaches us a psychology of depths."
Memory and History
This psychic dimension of the Water Lilies finds a troubling echo in their historical context. While Monet was painting his water gardens, the trenches of the First World War were becoming the tombs of a generation (The Water Lilies of the Orangerie were offered to France on November 12, 1918, celebrating the Armistice as the end of a carnage). This tragic contemporaneity charges the Water Lilies with an unsuspected memorial dimension: beneath the beauty of the pictorial surface sleep the dead, just as beneath the peaceful reflections of ponds rest the bodies of soldiers in the waterlogged lands of the front.
The dissolution of the motif, a major formal characteristic of the Water Lilies, takes on a new dimension here. It is no longer just a pictorial innovation announcing abstraction, but a meditation on the fragility of the visible and the porosity of worlds. The water lilies floating between two waters become symbols of a mysterious in-between, where forms constantly break down and recompose themselves.
Contemporary Echoes
It is in this perspective that the exhibition brings together artists whose work extends and reinvents this meditation on surface and its mysteries. Their works echo what Walter Benjamin called the "work of memory": not simple remembrance but an active process where the present reactivates and transforms traces of the past.
Submerged Mythologies
Orsten Groom, in the lineage of Aby Warburg and his conception of the "survival" (2) of images, brings to the surface a personal mythology where symbols collide. His canvases, true pictorial palimpsests, turn water lilies into portals to submerged worlds. Through telluric and convulsive painting, he brings forth the ghosts of History, creating hallucinated visions where the aquatic motif becomes the theater of a resurgence of collective myths and traumas.
Light as Matter
Vincent Beaurin extends Monet's studies on light by fragmenting it into a multitude of chromatic points. His works, playing with the diffraction of vision, create moving surfaces where color decomposes as through a liquid wave. This approach echoes the dissolution of motif in Monet's work, while proposing a new materiality where light becomes substance.
Microcosms and Metamorphoses
Marlène Mocquet's paintings create "heterotopias" (3): other spaces where the usual rules of the visible are suspended. Her works, between still life and living ecosystem, capture the precise moment where matter transforms, where life emerges from decomposition. Microcosms, both precious and disturbing, like echoes of Giverny's pools.
Floating Bodies
Vincent Gicquel's "liquid" figures evoke abjection, that troubled zone where boundaries between self and other, living and dead dissolve (4). His characters, oscillating between comic and disturbing, float in an undefined space like joyful drowned souls, recalling the engulfed dead of the trenches while transfiguring them in a dance at once macabre, liberating, and grotesque.
A Buried Cabaret
The pictorial work of Ludivine Gonthier is part of a feminine emancipation movement, featuring characters in a baroque and flamboyant aesthetic. Through an autofictional approach, she explores the codes of contemporary new burlesque, using her canvases as spaces of resistance against the triviality of the present. Through this deliberate baroque style, she transforms banality into spectacle and re-enchants everyday life.
The Sylvan Guardians
Christophe Doucet's sculptures and his way of working them in the middle of a forest embody what Michel de Certeau called the "arts of doing": a practice where artisanal gesture becomes a carrier of magic. His figures carved in wood, both whimsical and enchanted, establish a bridge between the world of the living and that of fetishes and magic. These contemporary totems, benevolent sentinels at the edge of worlds, remind us that the boundary between visible and invisible is also that which separates and connects the terrestrial world and the aquatic world.
An Alternative Modernity
The exhibition thus proposes a rereading of the Water Lilies through the "distribution of the sensible" (5): not simply formal revolution but profound reconfiguration of our relationship to the visible. This constellation of works draws a "dialectical image" (6): a moment where past and present enter into constellation to produce possible new meanings.
As Maurice Blanchot wrote, "the image is what withdraws from the visible to preserve its secret," the Water Lilies and their contemporary echoes remind us that every surface is also a depth, that every present is haunted by its disappeared, and that the most living art is that which knows how to conjugate the beauty of the visible with the mysteries that found it. In a contemporary world obsessed with immediacy, they remind us of the necessity of this plunge into the depths, where beauty dialogues with memory, and where the present is enriched by echoes of the past.
(1) What Clement Greenberg would later theorize as the advent of "modernist flatness," initiating an entire literature around American abstract painters, from Pollock to Rothko.
(2) The passage from the state of crisis to the state of "beyond crisis" implies a certain capacity to ignore the crisis, to live it fully and finally to return from it by being reborn. Aby Warburg, German art historian, would dedicate the year 1918 to compiling documents and testimonies to try to understand the atrocity of war and the beginning of his own madness.
(3) Heterotopia is a concept forged by Michel Foucault in a 1967 lecture titled "Of Other Spaces." He defines heterotopias as a physical location of utopia. They are concrete spaces that host the imaginary, like a child's cabin or a theater.
(4) "There is in abjection one of those violent and dark revolts of being against what threatens it and seems to come from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable."
Julia Kristeva, excerpt from Powers of Horror, Editions du Seuil, 1980
(5) Georges Didi-Huberman, The Open Image, Motifs of Incarnation in Visual Arts, Gallimard, 2007
(6) Jacques Rancière, The Distribution of the Sensible, Aesthetics and Politics, La Fabrique editions, 2000