A journey through the visible and the unseen: ‘Clair-obscur’ opens at the Bourse de Commerce

Opening tomorrow, March 4th, and running through August 25th, 2026, Clair-obscur brings together nearly one hundred works from the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. The exhibition explores the enduring legacy of chiaroscuro and the evolving dialogue of light and shadow in art, transforming the museum into a luminous yet crepuscular landscape where the visible and invisible converge.

Curated by Emma Lavigne, the project examines how artists from the modern era to today probe darkness as a way of understanding contemporaneity — echoing philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion that to be truly contemporary is to perceive the shadows of one’s time.

Pinault Collection: from darkness to illumination

Drawing exclusively from the Pinault Collection — with the addition of several historic modernist works — Clair-obscur traces a journey from darkness to light. Inspired by the dramatic contrasts perfected by Caravaggio, the exhibition positions chiaroscuro not merely as a technique but as a philosophical principle and narrative device.

This visual language reverberates in works by Victor Man, whose muted canvases evoke melancholy introspection, and in two major pieces by Bill Viola, where figures slowly emerge from shadow in meditative temporality. Across the galleries, painting, sculpture, and video weave together the materiality of light and the subconscious weight of darkness.

In the Rotunda beneath the museum’s dome, Pierre Huyghe presents Camata (2024), first shown in Venice. Installed as a timeless amphitheatre, the work unfolds as a metaphysical ritual filmed in Chile’s Atacama Desert — a meditation on humanity’s place between night and day, earth and sky.

Light and shadow in art: the exhibition sections

The exhibition unfolds across distinct thematic sections, each deepening the exploration of light and shadow in art.

Nocturne transforms the lower level into an immersive darkness, resonating with the late works of Francisco Goya and featuring video installations where chiaroscuro becomes both narrative and atmosphere. In the Salon, paintings by Sigmar Polke engage in a textured dialogue, referencing Renaissance graphic traditions while blurring the boundaries between the sacred and the profane.

Germination pairs the dreamlike landscapes of Yves Tanguy with Pierre Huyghe’s works, creating a liminal space of desert and aquatic reveries. Incandescence turns toward spiritual intensity, bringing together figures such as Carol Rama and Bill Viola, whose works illuminate existential and sacred dimensions within contemporary life. 

In Fog, artists including Wolfgang Tillmans and Frank Bowling dissolve horizons into vaporous landscapes, evoking both catastrophe and sublimity. Finally, Shadows revisits postwar figuration through modern masters such as Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet, whose fragile, distorted figures emerge from the trauma of the twentieth century.

Across its galleries, Clair-obscur positions chiaroscuro as a timeless and continually renewed visual language. Through the works of the Pinault Collection, light and shadow in art become tools not only of representation, but of revelation — illuminating the depths of the present by daring to look into its darkness.