Marcel Broodthaers exhbition: Bateau Tableau 1973

Campoli Presti is pleased to inaugurate with Bateau Tableau (1973) by Marcel Broodthaers a series of exhibitions in the foyer of 223 Cambridge Heath Road. Solo presentations will be held periodically in conjunction with the gallery’s programme.

Bateau Tableau originates from a 19th century amateur naval painting purchased in a curiosity shop at rue Jacob in Paris. Projecting details of the painting via slides, Broodthaers relates his imagined narrative of the painting as each still image is synchronized to the details revealed by the moving camera. Playing with the words “bateau” boat and “tableau” painting, the painting becomes the subject of the work. As he stated “you have believed to see a painting, but nevertheless you have seen a film.”

This work was an important source of inspiration for Rosalind Krauss’s influential essay, A Voyage on the North Sea. Krauss recognizes Broodthaers engagement in the complexities of the post-medium through his contemplation of outmoded forms, such as the techniques of early cinema. Pointing out the aggregative nature of film, he reveals the nature of fiction as constitutive layers rather than a solid, unitary foundation. Acknowledging Broodthaers relationship to painting, Krauss states that Bateau Tableau could similarly be a lecture on the history of painterly modernism, from Manet’s conception of pictorial flatness to Robert Ryman’s monochromes. Indeed, while the works’ domination of the room might remind us of Broodthaers’s earlier explorations of installation art -his Un Jardin d’hiver (Winter Garden), 1974, or Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles, Section des Figures (The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present), 1972- the work shows a double commitment to painting as a specific medium and to a magnificently slow exfoliation of painting’s history.