Cantos

"In his preface to his work Cantos, Barnett Newman wrote how lithography is an instrument to be played. It is like a piano... and as with an instrument, it interprets... creation is to do with 'playing'.Artists (like pianists) deploy energy in playing, that is, interpreting their creation. This energy (and its variations) in connection with a certain work object was the main reason behind the choice of works and artists. Then comes the object of this energy. Something incomprehensible that leaves us gasping faced with the elusive force of what needs no justification. A compulsion that finds its purpose only in the work. A compulsion to the work."

By Nobuyoshi Araki, there will be a wall of flowers facing a few nudes, but with no opposition between the two. There will be a cat sticking its tongue out and Araki himself thumbing his nose. Olivier Foulon will have two rooms: one for Models, the other for Copies. Rubbing shoulders in these two rooms there will be, among other things, the story of art, the story of hats, the story of wolves (not forgetting that hats are sometimes for pulling rabbits out of, a rabbit being also synonymous in French with standing someone up). The models may be female or artworks. The copies show interest in the models. There wiIl be drawings, slides, books and stories. Cantos will show - and this is quite an event - four large drawings by Pierre Klossowski. Scenes that are barely imaginable, that question and disturb, where the image is of the order of the idée fixe, that is to say frozen in a pose. That Pierre Klossowski was a great writer as we know serves as a reminder that the exhibition is partly based on literature, i.e. fiction.On display by John Murphy there will be three large paintings depicting a dog (of the same breed as dogs by Vélasquez, Watteau and Courbet). But the dog is only a tiny fraction of a much greater whole, which is painting. A fourth work shows two postcards of works by Yves Klein. Here painting is linked to the body and to death.Joëlle Tuerlinckx will be reminding us that images cast shadows in an installation showing up the absence of the white walls in the Casino Luxembourg's largest room. The pictures carried by the walls will recall how one of the origins of pictures was a tale of shadow, that of the body of the loved one setting off into battle. In the only room with windows, the only room looking out onto the city, it will be remembered that the picture is also a kind of window.This again is why there will be an extra display in the old newspaper kiosk near the Adolphe bridge, where the windows will be turned into grids, once more raising the question of how we look at things. This work will be an installation produced in collaboration with Willem Oorebeek.Lastly, Eric Van Hove brings to us nineteen scrolls of calligraphs from Japan. There are not many westerners around practising an Oriental style that is still foreign to us. The very brushstrokes of Chinese or Japanese writing paint a picture.