Cocktail Hour at a François Morellet Exhibition

Invitation card of the exhibition in Thibaut de Ruyter's trademark - the negative photograph

Raisins, green tomatoes and crackers were served together with some delicious cocktails at last night’s finissage of Neue-Neue Nationalgalerie, a François Morellet exhibition at Jordan/Seydoux. I arrived late, hadn’t eaten, and it was the first thing I went for. I swiftly brushed by curator Thibaut de Ruyter, letting him know my first impression - “so 1950s!” He took that the wrong way and kept shadowing me during the rest of the night saying the exhibition was referencing two decades later: the 1970s. Fact is that it was in the 1970s that Morellet had his first big retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Exhibiting at the Neue Nationalgalerie is always a bit of a struggle for artists since there are no walls. Thibaut told me that Van der Rohe had been on the lazy side and he had used an unrealized project for the Bacardi family in Cuba in order to build the museum in Berlin. The result is a transparent hall which is better for having cocktail parties than for hanging exhibitions. So Morellet decided to hang his paintings with wires from the ceiling, which turned out to be a magnificent idea. 

Exhibition view

Thibaut de Ruyter found those exhibition photos of the 1970s, plastered them on one wall, and took over the same hanging for the other works in the space. That’s why I got the 1950s effect, because I’m sure that this hanging method was invented in that decade after the war, a time when space was economized to the fullest. Think of the 1950s kitchens and offices. The same happened with exhibitions space - walls or no walls, hang the pictures in the middle! At least, that’s my theory - I don’t know where I got it from, probably Mad Men. But I must say that it’s also Morellet’s work that made me think in that direction. When you see his work as such, you can see it has aesthetics, but there is also something that makes you wonder if he wasn’t just a white male with the right connections in the 1950s, when being a man still meant you owned the place. This was before Andy Warhol came in.

The thing is, Morellet’s work needs installation and then it does magic. He was apparently good at it himself, and so is Thibaut de Ruyter, who is an architect, which you notice because he is meticulous about space - a wrong plinth can freak him out whereas a perfect symmetry of lines makes him happy. That’s the person you need to handle Morellet’s work. Also because Thibaut, despite his rigour about the 1970s, brings his own subtle humour to it. I mean, he chose the color green for one wall to evoke the green marble shafts of the Neue Nationalgalerie. I can’t explain to you why that is funny but I had to laugh when he told me, so it is. Thibaut actually told me that Morellet himself had a sense of humour.  A visitor said you could see the humour in the titles: they describe exactly what is being done in the paintings (Du vert à l’orange (5 trames de carrés réguliers pivotées sur le côté) which is also kind of funny in that very particular funny kind of way.