Miet opens the major retrospective on Yves Klein at Bozar.
Review by Ya.l Hirsch:
"Sexy, funny, and critical with a beautiful wink.
Not to be missed."
During the opening of Yves Klein. Theatre of the Void, Miet Warlop presents the performance HORSE. A Man A Woman A Desire for Adventure in which she gallops through the exhibition.
Physical actions, sculptural props and scenic interventions that artfully cancel each other out on stage. It turns them into a sculptural live event creating a temporary fantasy that begins to crumble in the moment of its completion. With a woman, a carrot, a man, guitars and a harmonica.
With:
Tim Coenen, Joppe Tanghe, Erik Nevin, Laura Vanborm, Dimitri Verberckt, Miet Warlop
On Tuesday, March 28, 2017, to open the great retrospective it dedicates to the inventor of the happening in France, Yves Klein, the Bozar organized a performance session in the large entrance hall of the Palace designed by Horta.
On the menu: the plastic and sexy game on the femininity and colour of Miet Warlop and the happening of hooded colours by Pieter van den Bosch. Two colourful proposals to lead to a wiser retrospective: thematic, inhabited by Klein’s spirituality and very seriously articulated around his search for the “Theatre of Emptiness”.
While a free entrance crowd is concentrated near the bar in the majestic hall of the Bozar, electric guitar riffs enjoin us to follow the rhythm of two well-rolled creatures: one wears a magenta dress, the other, nothing on his superb ass, except a ponytail. While climbing the stairs that lead up to the exhibition, the two nymphs climb one on top of the other.
With this sexy, funny and critical performance, Miet Warlop makes a pretty wink at Klein’s “prints” and her way of exposing women in her performances.
We had been given yellow earplugs (or everything but the obese blue IKB) and we saw a series of performers dressed in black suits and hoods to make a big noise in a voluminous and mysterious tent, but when the shots went off, we were still scared. The colour sprayed against the white hanging in this performance-attempt by Pieter van den Bosch, which was as reminiscent of Niki de Saint-Phalle as it was of Yves Klein, the happening revived by the terrorist appearance of the ten or so actors themselves painted in Brief and intense colours, the performances on the eve of the opening of the Yves Klein exhibition in Bozar paid a fine tribute to the artist, who died in 1962 from a heart attack at the age of 34.
To be perfectly in the clear, they may have lacked a long discussion session led by a worthy heir to Pierre Restany, but fortunately, the exhibition itself did this work of putting things into perspective.
And this one, entitled “Le th..tre du vide”, was at the same time classical, thematic and effective in resituating and classifying Yves Klein’s works among the “serious” and “inspired” corpora as well as “pioneers” or “marketer of the performing society”.
We begin with childhood in Nice and the initial spirituality of man who is initiated into emptiness through judo. Yves Klein inherits the sky in the sharing of the universe that he does with his two friends, Claude Pascal and Arman. He learned the art of gilding with leaves in London, discovered the art of fresco in Italy with Giotto. Then we switched to colour: Since the monochrome paintings of the 1950s, there has been a real work of staging both the artist and the void.
He decides to reduce his palette to attract attention and summarizes his monochromes in blue. And we learn that in fact the patent is never registered for IKB Blue but for fixing it.
Through this blue, Klein seems to announce before Gargarin goes into space that the earth is blue. But Overseas France was difficult to extend and Klein began to use sponges with lunar traces that he gradually took out of the canvas to give his autonomy to the colour. Moreover, this passionate lover of the void and stunned visitor to Hiroshima is interested in the power of destruction but also in the creation of fire, he gauges, adopts his blue flame and decides to expose only what the flame leaves.
In 1961, in Krefeld, he exhibited his “ardent bushes”, he also threw his naked and wet models against a canvas which he then passed with a blowtorch. The works are just the ashes of his art and for Klein, what matters most is the idea.
We also move on to anthropomorphs, videos of performances and traces to support them, and the Bozar reminds us that there is not only blue but also pink, as in the flesh of the Christian incarnation, before ending up both on the radiance of the great blue works IKB that shine and on the artist’s most famous performances: the angel’s jump and the “zones of stabilized artistic sensitivity that he “sells” in Italy.
The exhibition gives a good account, sometimes with a serious and sometimes a little chilling, of Yves Klein’s research. She hypothesized that every action in her theatre was inhabited by a somewhat tragic spirituality full of meaning and responsibility. It also allows you to see and review in various formats about fifty of his key works, which easily interact with the two performances of the opening evening... A retrospective not to be missed.
Ya.l Hirsch