1870 -1910 · Blacks, apparitions and interior color

Redon puts the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible: floating heads, underwater depths, closed eyes and apparitions give a credible form to the states of dreams.

Odilon Redon grew up partly in the solitude of the Peyrelebade family estate, in the middle of the Médoc moors. This childhood nourished a lasting relationship with shadow, silence and imagination. After training in drawing and a decisive meeting with the engraver Rodolphe Bresdin, he developed his charcoal in the 1870s and 1880s, which he called his "blacks". Coal, faded, erased or incised, created a material that was both precise and nebulous. Redon can reveal a flying eye, a severed head, a human plant or an uncertain organism without breaking the internal plausibility of the image. He does not seek to illustrate a dream already told; the form is born from the work of the matter and retains its ambiguity. Fantasmagoria and Apparition are located on this border between presence and dissolution. Underwater vision transposes the strangeness of the natural sciences towards an environment without a stable scale. From the 1890s, pastel and painting opened his imagination to a luminous color. Closed eyes, probably inspired by his wife Camille, make a face float in an indefinite space; sleep, meditation, absence and death remain possible simultaneously. The transition from black to color therefore does not eliminate the invisible. It gives it other climates, from dark poppy to iridescent clouds. Redon thus becomes a major figure in symbolism and a precursor modern explorations of the unconscious. The selection "Visions and imagination of Odilon Redon" notably compares Fantasmagoria and Underwater Vision. His reading favors movement.

Redon does not copy the dream: he constructs improbable beings precisely enough for them to begin to live according to their own laws.