Kounellis at the Monnaie

The great Jannis Kounellis’ exhibition at the Monnaie in Paris is an exquisite exercise in intarsia in which he re-proposes and inserts major old works and peaks drawn from his considerable catalogue.

Jannis Kounellis, exhibition view at the Monnaie de Paris, 2016

Every legend, dispute and controversy regarding Arte Povera seems, today, to have been flattened to fit the single narrative of the market but the personal grammar of the great artist Jannis Kounellis stands quite integral, pertinent and filled with the same absolute beauty as when it first appeared.

He has appropriated the spaces of the Monnaie de Paris with an imposing work that goes beyond that of the solo exhibition. It is an exquisite exercise in intarsia in which he re-proposes and inserts major old works and peaks drawn from his considerable catalogue. The encounter is decisive and the ensuing path a poetic promise fostered by the friction between his materials and the venue’s architecture and civil history.

The work of Kounellis, who has accustomed us to the idea of the theatre space over the years, continues to meet up with all his past episodes but is no longer bound only to his personal biography. The details and materials filled with visual content that he is constantly reactivating have become our own and his powerful magic invites us to enjoy them as during his first moments of subversion. It is a record made up of single acts of stripping away and reducing to a minimum the elements that shape his untarnished vision of reality, history and art. His personal attraction to the work of assembling or creating meaning is enacted in the difficult relationship between space and time, often sidereally distant. The constant feature of his action remains and it is this conceiving for a specific place that drives him to the extreme and draw out potential new readings and perceptions.

Starting from the colossal scale of the eight iron easels, on which he has installed eight sheets of sheet metal in homage to as many artists in history, all in the spring and almost affected light of the Salle Dupré. Only a date marked on the back gives an indication of the powerful iconoclasm of the assumption. You might think that these very qualities of Kounellis the painter are now working to extend signs and impressions. Long, long ago he abandoned canvas and opened up a dialectic where the onlookers can themselves start to penetrate the spaces of freedom and discovery. So, all seems present and summoned once again, starting from his coal bin, the first recognisable object (and not yet a relic) that can continue the discussion on the potential endurance of Arte Povera compared with Minimalism. It is hard to understand whether the guerrilla war notes Celant spoke of in the 1960s are the same as these at work in Kounellis reloaded but the political possibilities of the work remain intact and his lexicon centred on perfecting itself.

This can be inferred from the long and splendid series of untitled works dating from 1967 to 2016 which the artist has lined up, saturating the first room with meaning. He mixes the 1969 camp bed with live animals (rats), the camp bed with combustion, the metal bowl with a knife and goldfish, the boat pieces, the iron beams, the sewing machine and the burlap sacks but, because in Kounellis’ work journalistic description is abused and, more often than not, ends up as a list of materials such as the one above, it is necessary to find a way out. This is why reading them in relation to the place gives, each time, a sense of ambling through a great compositional equilibrium.

Which is why, in some cases the rooms here seem totally empty of works, a difficult trick in an exhibition featuring ten tons of material, yet quite light. The stacked jute is the colour and sfumato of the fine plaster and the boat pieces are the colour of the marbles. We could continue with the yellow of the sulphur and the large monochromes, the glass screened with his usual scales, loaded with old fashioned-looking glasses, melancholic forms in very Venetian colours that diffuse a special kind of light.

So, we have the magic of an installation that, at times, seems straight out of a Tiepolo painting. There is all the drama of the Kounellis fire and the lacerated and rolled sheet metal but also his ability to recreate the tension of surprising works such as the Senza Titolo (Da Inventare sul Posto) of 1972 presented at the Attico gallery in Rome and then reactivated in Harald Szeemann’s Documenta 5. The canvas with the score from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and his Twombly-like rose is re-proposed with the live performance of a musician and ballerina. In Kounellis’ career, this marked an even stronger detachment from classical materials and, if you think about it, was truly ahead of its times.

The same relation to Philippe Parreno’s use of Petrushka is found in the material drift which has fostered so much relational art in more recent years.

Kounellis has, however, repeatedly clarified his relationship with sources and materials. A quintal of coal remains a quintal of coal and the serenity of his art is founded rather on the credibility that stems from control of the sources. Chiara Parisi and Frédéric Legros, who curated and took the risk of presenting a historic artist of the gravitas of Kounellis, for the second time in a Paris institution – the first was at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1980–, write it loud and clear in the presentation of the work. Kounellis came emptyhanded. Might he have used the carte blanche afforded to him as the loveliest possible option to invest spaces steeped in a sense of history and allow visitors to discover them via works so rare as to seem previously unseen, such as Senza titolo (Libertà o Morte, W. Marat W. Robespierre), dated 1969 and now in the Viehof Collection.

Jannis Kounellis, exhbition view at the Monnaie de Paris,Jannis Kounellis, exhibition view at the Monnaie de Paris, 2016 2016 — Jannis Kounellis, exhibition view at the Monnaie de Paris, 2016

The coin minted for the occasion features a Kounellis holding a lit candle on a metal plate in his mouth as in the photo of one of his untitled works dated 1989. The candle in his 1969 work was lit for the opening but unfortunately would be blackened by the flame and so was extinguished. Just as for the many works that connote and identify him, the flame and its traces are there to measure the impact of purification and the austere silence of his dogmas, all in an orderly composition.

Kounellis at the Monnaie

The great Jannis Kounellis’ exhibition at the Monnaie in Paris is an exquisite exercise in intarsia in which he re-proposes and inserts major old works and peaks drawn from his considerable catalogue.

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