Lime Green And Black Suit

Kentridge, five themes

Aesthetics and Politics at the Jeu de Paume in Paris

Much has been written on the political commitment of William Kentridge. The artist, white, South African anti-apartheid Battut, now the star of a retrospective at the Louvre and the Jeu de Paume in Paris (until September 5). His best known works are animated in black and white and put in succession Expressionist charcoal drawing. Most famous of all, the cycle of Soho Eckstein, fictional story of a tycoon and a bit 'Mafioso, graphic translation of capitalism and its greed, that eat up the distillate of the injustices of segregation in South Africa. Less known, however, the complexity, the facets of his ethical and political conception of art. That does not stop a fight for another win, but questions with no certainty about the ability and the limitations of men.
The exhibition, which landed as MOMA, has a very suggestive title Five themes (five themes) and intends to rebuild the search for Kentridge in all its complexity. The complaint of the early social, ethical and existential To the question of recent years. From the portrait of the ruthless capitalist society, the problematic exercise of the self as an artist. How can, in fact, the intellectual who denounced the brutality of the story, get out in the trial on which it is part of humanity? The answer to this crucial question, is one of the five themes studied by the exhibition, the artist in the studio. Three video screened at the same time in which depicting Kentridge and undoes itself, in search of an impossible moral integrity. A deconstruction of the self and its aspirations for humanity that seems to ask intelligent, knowing clearly what is evil, does not find the will to refrain from committing it.
the European rationalism incapable of an answer, comes to the rescue of Kentridge whole African culture. His sense of the spiritual, his tragic view of existence where life, incredible gift is a terrible question that keeps in check the reason, a being thrown into space, a being possessed by underground energy and perpetually threatened by the end. One of the unknown ancestral wisdom that, in the face of aporia of the intellect is several years been the largest contributor to the renewal of Kentridge cosmopolitan contemporary art.