In Artpress, Maud de la Forterie writes on Alfredo Jaar's exhibition La Fin du Monde.
What unfolds here is a true scenography, a fully assumed sense of the dramatic. The display, absolutely austere, achieves a vertiginous magnitude through its very restraint: a pedestal, a vitrine, and a light source. Nothing more. What is at stake is a decisive shift — a refusal of monumentality in favour of a stripped-back gravity.
The artist inverts the logic of contemporary spectacle, and it is in the tension between the tiny cube and the vastness of the surrounding space that the scale provokes a striking visual response. Everything is held, contained, in a balance between conceptual rigour and physical presence.
Jaar chooses the minimal, the concentrated, staying faithful to an economy of compression that runs throughout his oeuvre. This almost ascetic gesture serves as a warning. The red here is not an aesthetic effect, but a sign: the colour of blood and life, but also of danger and halting.
