Book, 2004, Denys Riout
Yves Klein Manifester l'immatériel
In April 1958, Yves Klein, known for his monochromes and his attachment to blue, presented an exhibition in which no painting, no sculpture, no object were visible. This event, soon known as the "Empty Exhibition", was a landmark. But this title, which was not due to the artist, makes his project almost incomprehensible. Klein, however, repeatedly explained his intentions. Thanks to this "immaterialization of the painting", he hoped to "create an atmosphere, an invisible but present pictorial climate" capable of manifesting, by its radiation, the very essence of painting: the "immaterial pictorial sensibility".
Since his first attempt at a presentation of the "invisible pictorial sensibility" in 1957, until his death in 1962, at the age of thirty-four, Yves Klein has never stopped deepening and to refine his words. At the same time, he imagined using the bodies of young women as "living brushes". Applying the imprint of their flesh on supports arranged for this purpose, they realized paintings perfectly visible: "Anthropometries". Far from emerging from a contradictory aspiration, these two modalities of existence of his work rest on an articulation which is at the heart of the fundamental Christian Mystery, the Incarnation. Such is the intuition developed in this essay.