This exhibition, whose title "the blind spot" refers to the Mariotte spot (the only part of the retina that does not see), is the culmination of new work by the photographer and visual artist Jacqueline Salmon based on an object that is central to, and yet very absent from, research in the history of art: the perizonium.
Attached to the figure of Christ, this loincloth is a veil of modesty, a challenge in terms of representation for artists and a precious relic for the Church. But by tracing the myriad of ways in which it has been drawn, painted or sculpted over the centuries, it also reveals itself to be a formidable indicator of the artistic and religious mentalities of Western societies concerning the representation of the Christ-like body, both human and divine. From Gothic Germany to Renaissance Italy, from Flanders to the Spain of the Golden Age, the imagery of the perizonium was codified by theology, but it was also sometimes influenced by civil fashions or invented from scratch by artists, who provided infinite ways to drape it. Some painters thus invented models that were widely taken up in their wake, such as Giotto, who introduced transparency, or Rogier van der Weyden, whose perizonia detach from Christ to become flying draperies. Some, like Michelangelo, went as far as to eliminate it. Twentieth-century artists fluctuated between taking up models from the past and personalising the subject to the extreme, as in the case of Chagall, who appropriated the Jewish prayer veil to cover Jesus' hips, or Picasso, who combined a bullfighter's cape with his Christ's loincloth.
Despite the key issues it raises, the perizonium is still a "blind spot" in iconographic research, almost a non-issue, which has been commented on much less than other constituent elements of the Passion scenes: the position of Christ's body, his stigmata, the figures surrounding Him, the variety of their expressions, the way the blood flows, etc. By empirically and with the help of her camera creating a staggering array of photographs of the perizonium (photographs she has taken in situ in museums, galleries and antique shops), which she supplemented by collecting numerous reproductions of works in books and on the Internet, Jacqueline Salmon covers the history of art from the 4th to the 20th century and provides what is the most advanced study ever carried out on the subject.
Above all, she establishes the photographer's gaze as the cornerstone of her approach and makes framing and composition a tool for dissection that she places at the heart of her photographic practice. Finally, she revitalises the exercise of photographing works of art, not considered here as a tool for reproduction, but rather as a medium of interpretation in its own right.
Initially scheduled for 2020, the exhibition "The Blind Spot" benefitted from two additional years enabling Jacqueline Salmon to further enrich her collection of perizonia. Today, the exhibition includes some 230 prints.
The first part of the exhibition consists of thirteen photographs and a notebook - fourteen "stations", a fortuitous but not meaningless reflection of those in the Passion of Christ - which are inserted into the permanent collections to maintain temporal, stylistic or simply aesthetic links with the paintings of Jacques Réattu, the sculptures of Germaine Richier and Ossip Zadkine, and the drawings of Pablo Picasso and Pierre Buraglio.
The second part is devoted to the heart of the research. Organised by period and manner of draping, the tour begins with the earliest representations of perizonia, still strongly influenced by the Byzantine icon, and ends with the reinvention of the Passion subjects by 20th century painters (Bacon, Sutherland, Chagall). It is interspersed with the artist's photographs, presented in isolation (for the major works) or in the form of image clouds, as well as her precious research notebooks, which constitute the matrix of the exhibition and the accompanying book.
