From the Publisher:
Artlantern writers and friends met in Paris for a week of Art Basel and many other exhibitions celebrated during Paris Art Week, continuing after. It was universally agreed that the Gerhard Richter retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton was the best, most comprehensive, surprising and beautiful with the Greuze exhibit at the Petit Palais, across the plaza from Art Basel at the Grand Palais and the De La Tour show a close second and third. From the contemporary work of Richter to the eighteenth-century De La Tour paintings and the nineteenth-century Greuze paintings. The beauty of the Grand Palais itself, and the work of Art Basel within it, showed that Europe has never wavered in incorporating beauty with truth, as Keats so wonderfully described the Grecian Urn. These paintings and the architecture they reside in are a joy forever.
Devin Ratheal, in contradistinction to Richtger’s seeking to paint his identity rather than that assigned to him by others mark, in Ratheal’s words, “the violent destabilization of identity that is disconnected from being and cannot admit difference”, then combining old master paintings newly expressed by ripping and reorganizing inherited images into a recognizable image of the modern, hellish world he presents. Jorge Benitez writes of the importance of publicly funded art, and of Canada’s generous approach to it. Jeanne Stanek writes of the present art market and the implications of government intervention in controlling it.
It all underlines Artlantern’s thesis that art is important. Art Matters. Art can open eyes and minds and persuade and bring enlightenment into a dark world.