I can't bear to see you, even when painted

This exhibition shows one of the paths that figuration has followed in painting over the last fifty years. After several years in which figurative painting found itself being almost torn down from the picture rails and considered an art of the past, it is now enjoying a triumphant return.

The forms of figurative paintings, with their own particular brands of realism, proliferated from the end of the 19th century onwards, and today, just like music, they have become mixed together, so that epochs and realisms frequently clash with one another in the same picture. Painting does not have a linear chronology, in terms of what it shows or what it interprets in the actual moment of its realisation: it resists the timelessness of what is visible.

[…]

Given its provocative nature, the title of the exhibition leads us to the heart of the subject: seeing in painting, seeing painting is a complicated matter, for sometimes as the great art historian, Daniel Arasse, used to stress: “we see nothing…” (2000).
 

Eric Corne, curator
[Excerpt from the text published in the exhibition leaflet]