Paris has an appointment again with Vasarely, king charming from the 1970s to the games kinetic if design and the impact film, fell in love and forgetting at the time of his death in 1997. Dedicate a retrospective today, after more than a half-century of silence, is the frank adventure, the reconquest of the image, and the change resolved optical. The two commissioners, Michel Gauthier, and Arnauld Pierre, shares the taste of the history of art and its contemporary reading. They have managed to make a clear exposure such as water from the rock is from a work abounding. A journey in seven stages which does not saturate the eye and makes the Hungarian painter, all his singularity, the perfectionist, sensitive. A walk fluid that is smooth as the pebbles of Belle-Ile (1947), pop as the album Space Oddity of David Bowie in 1969, buxom as the dining room of the headquarters of the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt in 1970, fun such as the Rubik’s Cube invented by his fellow countryman Erno Rubik in 1974.

Esperanto visual

This voluntary return back in the history of taste has performed. At the opening, all the little art world rushed to see what remained of Vasarely and its optical illusions in the collective unconscious (the geometry is distorted to Vega 222 , 1969-1970). The artistic director of Fondation louis Vuitton Suzanne Pagé, out of his usual reserve and said he was “impressed by the intelligence of the skirmish,” which recites the “energy abstract” and the”esperanto visual” of the Hungarians in Paris, as a breeze (you can search for the error in the sumptuous Arny, 1967-1968, paper silk-screened, cut-and-pasted, which makes the poster and the cover of the catalogue).

Is it lack of references to the second half of the Twentieth century, and especially of this breed of people that are painters, mysterious covenant of the hand and the spirit? Just returned from a trip, Emmanuel Perrotin, gallery owner, globe-trotter from Paris, New York, Seoul and Shanghai, ran into this curious crowd, as if he was in search of a new talent. The artists, the painter pop Gérard Fromanger and the conceptual artist Franck Scurti, took their time in front of the columns intensely stained where the sculpture adds to the optical effect ( Large Iboya MC 174 , 1970). The public, dense as ever, seemed delighted, of those who go on holiday in front of this “folklore planétaire” dancing the signs and move the tables ( Vega , 1956, private collection, Belgium). The succession of spaces is done as in the space station in Kubrick through sas well thought of in which the commissioners explain without too much talk. The last room is black like the cosmos. The large y-series are the star names and jump to the eyes, like creatures of science fiction.

“Vasarely – sharing forms”, Centre Pompidou, Place Georges-Pompidou (IVe). Tel.: 01 44 78 12 33. Opening hours: everyday, 11 am to 21 pm, except mar. Until au6 may 2019. Cat.: “Vasarely, the sharing of the forms”, under the direction of Michel Gauthier, Arnauld Pierre (ed of the Centre Pompidou, 39,90 €). “Vasarely 40 records”, Hawley Edwards-Dujardin (ed Oak, 14,90 €). “Vasarely, a saga in the century”, Philippe Dana, Pierre Vasarely (Calmann-Lévy, 17,90 €).