The Never Ending Horizon. From the Renaissance to the present days

Walking into a wall can be a powerful artistic experience, as the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen invited its visitors to discover in 2018 [1]. This year, by contrast, it invites the public to contemplate “The Neverending Horizon”. The subject is an appealing one, even if at first glance it might seem disappointingly banal - far too vast, in any case, to be seriously addressed - and one might fear an exhibition similar to “Love” at the Louvre Lens (see the article). Not at all. One of the curators, Céline Flécheux, devoted her thesis to it – “Horizon and Representation” – and demonstrates here that it is indeed a pictorial and photographic challenge worthy of in-depth study. Situated between the visible and the invisible, associated as much with the notion of width as with that of depth, simultaneously synonymous with boundary and infinity, the horizon is defined by contradiction. And since it recedes as one approaches, it is a boundary that can never be crossed, a marker one carries within oneself. In this respect, it has an existential dimension: it belongs to the subject who sees it. Etymologically, it means “I delimit”.

As we move through the museum galleries and the pages of the catalogue, we discover that it is a much more nuanced artistic subject than it might seem - although “nuanced” may not be the most fitting word. Its intellectual demands may even make it somewhat forbidding. Far from the mere enjoyment of landscapes painted by the great masters, the curators seem to have favoured the analysis of a concept over the selection of masterpieces. No doubt Céline Flécheux’s training and profession - agrégée in philosophy, professor of aesthetics, history and theory of contemporary art - explain this tendency. The rather austere,…