Ando | Pinault. « BOURSE DU COMMERCE » Paris. Viewpoints.

" Bourse du Commerce | Foundation Pinault" .
Photo ©FDM, 2021.

BOURSE DU COMMERCE | Pinault Foundation
" OPENING "
Inaugural exhibition, until December 31, 2021.


"Realize your feelings" (Paul Cézanne)
In Arte's documentary behind the scenes of the transformation of "La Bourse du Commerce" into a 21st century museum, Tadao Ando points out that each visitor's step takes him to another universe, perspectives and points of view changing with each trip.

This is certainly true of all architecture - and could also be said of all sculpture. However, this principle is pushed here a hundredfold ... or ad infinitum, the concrete shell arranged in a helical structure in the center of the building constituting a system of successive hollowed out trays which are highlighted and connected to each other by a few staircases located around its perimeter.

This concrete shell being itself surrounded by another preliminary device [the initial building], also circular and multiplying the “points of view”, windows and places from where “to see and be seen” (in particular in height, under the large 19th century fresco of 1400 m2 painted under the glass roof), the multiplicity of points of view becomes dizzying.

And this is the first impression that seizes the visitor when he begins to wander in the space and look. Each trip gives rise to a new insight, a different vision.

Hence the feeling of constantly losing the benchmarks that we had just acquired. The architectural point of view (as Tadao Ando has so often explained) is that of a "living" one. Subject as such to incessant metamorphosis.

It is - first and foremost - the vision that becomes absolutely polymorphic, plural. And molt. And Change. And renews itself.

This process is all the stranger than the original building, this wheat hall transformed during its history into a "stock exchange", being circular and pierced by a set of regular windows, open on the inside, the space, thus delimited, seemed to be able to satisfy a form of total mastery of vision.

This panoptic vision (which was the privileged model of the prison system imagined at the very end of the 18th century by Jérémy Bentham) is thus totally, incessantly and at every step, thwarted and disturbed. Introducing this evolving concrete cylinder into the heart of the Hall is a game-changer.

Instant visual mastery of all or all has become impossible. And it is this skin and concrete membrane that, rising into the sky of the building, achieves this splendid impossibility. Architectural perception becomes the sum of a host of encounters and disturbed "points of view".

The success of the project lies in this radical subversion. Memory alone can then synthesize the whole, by threading points of view that constantly replace and outsmart one another.

Throughout everyone's journey - of walk and pilgrimage - the works of the artists are distributed as so many views within other "views" and new perspectives.

And when you exit the exhibition rooms, distributed around the concentric rings of the floors, to find yourself in the center of the building, new "points of view" are immediately created. It is then through the windows that surround the passageway - in the play of reflections and superimpositions - that the works in turn become changing and almost alive. - Transformed by the power of the equipment designed by Tadao Ando.

It is indeed an optical machinery that it is. Of a structure designed to modify the vision and make the perceptual adventure particularly exciting. This is reminiscent of - while being very different and otherwise complex - Brunelleschi's "tavoletta" (1415), this ingenious optical system which enabled the Florentine to multiply and interlock the baptistery of Florence, reflections and clouds.

This new Museum clearly appears (in itself) as a "masterpiece" and an extraordinary "operator of perceptions". It ruins any idea of a frozen museum space, total and concentration camp. Jérémy Bentham's system is found here broken, destroyed, transformed into its opposite. The concrete propeller of the structure constitutes the backbone of a free and evolving vision and perception.

The eye pinpoints each of the worlds it passes through, but a moment later the visitor's step has taken him to another perceptual side. The light plays there differently, the shadows change. The visitor here is like Cézanne who, using the cone and the cylinder, can see differently - and as many times as possible - different versions (different "states of being") of the Sainte Victoire.

Among all the works presented from the Pinault collection, we will take as the only example, but - by its "central" position - it is significant, the sculpture of Urs Fischer (Untitled Giambologna, 2011). This wax sculpture which is consumed and melts little by little - very slowly - is here viewed from all points of view: from above (we could add the vision of a drone or that of an aircraft crossing the dome ), from below, from the side and sideways, from near, far and in a fragmentary way to each of his appearances at the turn of a staircase, through a window, etc.

Destroying itself, like the vision which accompanies it, it melts and dissolves, reborn of itself in multiple fragments scattered in the central space. - The concrete, the dome, the light, the shadows serve it in turn as background and support. - She is at the center of all attentions and intentions, but melts and slips away. Rotates and dissolves.

Website of La Bourse du Commerce | Pinault Foundation

Documentary on ARTE TV

Paper on Chroniques d'Architecture

"Bourse du Commerce | Foundation Pinault."
Photo ©FDM, 2021.