The Musée Maillol in Paris invites the public to a major exhibition, a canon event due to the is staging a major exhibition, as much for the variety and grandeur of the included artists its artists (Picasso, Basquiat, Dubuffet, Giacometti, Klee, etc.) as well as as for the power of the strength of the artworks on display. The exhibition is named for an expressionwith takes as its starting point an expression that the American painter Mark Rothko once said, made his own: “If you seek fire, you will find ashes”.

“Fire Beneath the Ashes” is an exhibition that presents  presents a wide that aims to present a range of trends in modern art history in the history of modern art that have provoked ruptures comparable to those of the avant-gardes at the turn of the century. TWhat the artists in this exhibition share a profound have in common is their exploration of the depths of involuntary memory to draw from it the inspiration for their work. The consequential This experience of the unknown has liberated a practice that is marked as  supposedly naive or innocent, because it is not attached to is detached from any cultural foundation. In the artworks, or more likely in the poetic meanings of the works,   In the creations, or rather in the poetics, of these artists, the mechanisms of memory turn to prehistoric graffiti as much as to primitive art. Chaissac and Dubuffet, iIn order to give life to Art Brut, Chaissac and Dubuffet went so far as to reject traditional artistic all kinds of influences. 

Rothko once wrote of the risk of entirely immersing yourself in painting if you choose to commit yourself completely to the practice. In his writings, Rothko warns of the risks involved in immersing oneself in painting for those who agree to commit their entire being to it. A painter whose psyche is projected entirely into this search for the unconscious is unaware of what he will encounter. 

“I wanted to paint the scream more than the horror,” Francis Bacon confessed in his interviews with David Sylvester about the excruciating honesty radiating from his works. “The only possibility of renewal lies in opening our eyes and seeing the present disaster. An incomprehensible disaster, but one that you have to let in because it’s the truth”.