Paintings, Coffee, Wine, and Bistro Dining

An art opening at an alternative art space, where paintings have to contend with coffee, alcohol, chitchat and even food for attention.  Well, perhaps that isn’t so very different from any art opening minus the square footage and, in particular, the celebrity wattage present at blue-chip art galleries.

 

At  La Belle Hortense, which has a wine bar, a bookstore, and where one can also order food from the adjacent restaurant, Les Philosophes, when there is a crowd, it is really hard to find the calm necessary to look at paintings.  And such was the case this past Thursday at my opening.  There were American tourists having dinner at 7 pm, an insanely early hour to dine in  Paris, where most people don’t show up to restaurants before 8:30 pm.  There were local Parisians having their Happy Hour drinks, and there was my group of friends, all sipping wine and having hors-d’œuvres, having a difficult time looking at the paintings.  In fact, it wasn’t until well into the evening, around 11 pm, that we were able to settle into the “gallery” space in the back to look at the paintings.

The show, Bonjour Monsieur Indigo, is filled with dark blue paintings, and I had been worried about the lighting.  Dark paintings are difficult to exhibit because of the glare that can wipe out their surfaces.  Thankfully, everything was OK, the diffuse light in the back, no direct spots, gave the pieces a calm ethereal presence.  I had been contemplating varnishing the paintings, but am glad that I didn’t.  There was no glare, and even though the fine detail of the paintings were hard to see in the diffuse light, the overall effect was not unpleasant.

The best moment of the evening was towards the end, when I was leaving, a woman I didn’t know, who had spent the evening in the gallery space having drinks with her friends, thanked me for the show.  That small human connection warmed my heart. 

It is always a learning experience to have a group of paintings exhibited together.  Seeing the pieces together as a whole gives a large broad view of many months of work and that gives sense and direction to one’s studio practice, even if the active projects in the studio no longer have much to do with the pieces exhibited.

The show is up through March 31, so stop on by to browse, drink, and look.

For better images of the paintings exhibited, you can visit my website: <www.royforget.com>.

Addendum: July 2, 2018

It looks like the whole mixture of art and bar or art and food is not such an alternative thing after all, as Hauser and Wirth is doing the exact same thing.  

https://news.artnet.com/opinion/mega-gallery-podcasts-1311104#.WzpWsk_Jvls.facebook

But they are taking it one step further, they have a hotel as well in which guests can no doubt live with art on a trial.  Genius or decadence, you decide.