“In clay, Picasso found a new kind of freedom.”
For its opening at 40 rue de Seine, PM GALLERY presents an exhibition dedicated to Pablo Picasso, conceived through a deliberately non-hierarchical dialogue between photography, drawing, and ceramics. Rather than presenting Picasso through a retrospective, the show proposes a transversal reading of the artist’s practice, grounded in gesture, material transfor mation, and the construction of artistic presence.
At the core of the exhibition lies a productive tension between documentation and mythmaking. André Villers’ photographs, produced within the intimacy of Picasso’s studio, operate less as historical records than as active agents in the visual fabrication of the Picasso myth. Villers captures the unstable threshold where form emerges and authorship is performed. He becomes both witness and accomplice. The resulting images situate Picasso not simply as maker, but as subject whose identity is continuously negotiated between action, observation, and representation.
In counterpoint, the drawings on view reaffirm the radical economy of Picasso’s line. They resist in favor of compression: body reduced to tension, form reduced to necessity. The female figures, drawn on anonymous agenda pages, introduce a productive paradox. They are simultaneously projections of Picasso’s gaze and residues of a world that exceeds authorial control. The administrative and ephemeral nature of the agenda pages destabilizes the hierarchy between art object and everyday surface. Desire does not monumentalize itself; it inscribes itself in passing, transforming the fleeting gesture into a carrier of durable iconic force.
If the drawings compress meaning, the ceramics expand it materially. Long positioned at the margins of Picasso’s production, the Vallauris works emerge here as a central experimen tal field. In clay, Picasso negotiates volume, tactility, and narrative simultaneously. Functional objects are diverted from utility toward symbolic and mythological articulation. Bulls, corrida imagery, faces, birds: these recurring motifs reactivate a personal and cultural mythology through direct engagement with matter. Clay, unlike canvas or paper, imposes resistance, delay, and unpredictability. The ceramics therefore reveal a Picasso who is less concerned with mastery than with negotiation between intention and material response.
Find the available artwork at :
https://www.artsy.net/show/pm-gallery-picasso-the-studio-the-gaze-the-material
