One of the most frustrating errors when taking a photograph is discovering too late that it is out of focus, especially when there is no possibility of repeating it: the instant we wanted to capture has vanished and all we have left is a blurry image. The immediate reaction is to think that it is a useless, lost photograph. A mistake that we can no longer correct. But what if it wasn't really a mistake? What if what we have learned to discard —from a blurry image to a painting that seems unfinished— could be precisely what the artist wanted to achieve?
Can something that at first glance seems poorly done come to seem beautiful to us? And, above all, can it become art? This is the question that articulates the exhibition Out of Focus. Another Vision of Art, which invites us to look again at what we normally discard for being out of focus. Open since the end of May and until next September 27 at CaixaForum, the exhibition has so far been eclipsed by the neighboring exhibition Chez Matisse. The Legacy of a New Painting, which by its own merits has concentrated all eyes thanks to the intensity of colors of the French painter.
But now that Matisse has left the museum, it is a good time to stop before an exhibition that until now has gone somewhat unnoticed. Facing contemporary art is sometimes a challenge: we don't always know what we are looking at or what we should find in a work. If, in addition, the concept that articulates the exhibition is as abstract as blur, the visit requires even more calm. You have to slow down and look twice.
The exhibition also contains some small treasures that in themselves already make the exhibition an essential cultural stop. Among them, Le bassin aux nymphéas, harmonie rose (1900), one of the paintings from Claude Monet's famous Water Lilies series. A work that allows contemplating in the Catalan capital, and without the need to travel to Paris, a piece from the Musée de l'Orangerie, a mecca of impressionism and an institution with which CaixaForum co-organizes the exhibition.
It was precisely in this Parisian museum where the exhibition was first seen, before traveling to Madrid and being on display for a few months now in Barcelona, where it has also landed with some new features. Among them, The Harbour of Brest: The Quayside and Château, by William Turner, loaned by the Tate Modern in London, placed next to Monet and another of these small treasures for which the exhibition requires a visit.
The tour starts precisely in the room where Turner shares space with Monet's Water Lilies, to whom the exhibition attributes the introduction of blur as a conscious concept in the history of art. The French artist's interest was not so much in reproducing the water lilies faithfully —an aspiration that for centuries had marked much of painting, intent on representing reality with the greatest possible precision, as if it were a photograph—, but in painting them as he saw them. The light, the time of day he observed them, or even the environmental conditions changed the way he saw the water lilies, and that was precisely what he wanted to transfer to the painting.
An aesthetic and conscious decision that led him to introduce blur into his paintings, with blurred forms and ill-defined contours that could give the impression of being unfinished. And precisely this unfinished, almost sketchy appearance, was for a long time one of the arguments used by art critics to disparage his art: his paintings seemed half-finished, as if the artist did not master the techniques of painting.
Today, however, that supposed imperfection for which he was criticized is considered a true revolution in the history of art. Perhaps, however, attributing it solely to Monet —as the exhibition seems to propose— is to oversimplify the history of art and blur. Much earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had already blurred the contours of his characters and objects with the technique known as sfumato, and Turner himself, who shares a room with Monet in this exhibition, also explored how light could transform the way of perceiving a landscape.
But the exhibition doesn't seem to care much about this chronology, and perhaps that's why the works are not ordered by date. It doesn't aim to establish who was the first to blur, but to show how the same resource can acquire very different meanings depending on who uses it and when. Thus, next to Monet's water lilies, blurring appears in paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos. In total, there are 77 works by 58 artists, from Alberto Giacometti and Mark Rothko to Soledad Sevilla or Bill Viola.
Works that force the visitor to stop: there are works that ask to be approached. Others, to be moved away from. Some only acquire meaning when one squints. In others, the mobile phone can be like a help to try to see better: what appears blurry or decomposed to the naked eye, when photographed and viewed on the screen, regains a more defined shape.
Blurring as a way to represent pain and tragedy
Only by stopping in front of one work after another can we discover the different meanings that blurring has acquired in art. Beyond an aesthetic choice, as in the case of Monet or Turner, it can also become the only possible tool to address certain tragedies such as World War II or social issues. And perhaps one of the most interesting uses is precisely this: using blurriness to represent what is too difficult, painful, or complex to show clearly.
One of the most striking examples in the exhibition is Six Seconds, by the Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar, a photograph that has become the central and promotional image of the exhibition. The work stems from the artist's work on the 1994 Rwandan genocide and his attempt to represent a tragedy whose dimension seemed impossible to convey.
The photograph shows a young Rwandan woman from behind, completely out of focus. It might seem, at first glance, a failed photograph, one of those images that any newspaper or editor would quickly discard. But it is a deliberate artistic decision. Jaar had arranged with the young woman for her to recount the tragedy she had experienced, after the cruel murder of her parents. When it came time to photograph her, she changed her mind, decided not to speak, and left.
Jaar then raised the camera and shot almost out of focus. The result is a completely blurred figure, an image that in another context would probably have been discarded. But Jaar understood that this supposed failure was precisely what had to remain in the photograph because "it represents my inability to explain the experience of this woman or the misfortune of Rwanda," the artist recalls in the text accompanying the image in the CaixaForum exhibition. Jaar could photograph that woman, but he could not photograph her pain or transmit through a camera everything she had lived through. The blur thus becomes a way of expressing this distance: the impossibility of fully understanding such a painful experience that does not belong to us.
An idea that is repeated in much of the exhibition, where the blurry appears linked to some of the most traumatic episodes of the last century. World War II and the Holocaust, the 9/11 attacks —with Thomas Ruff's iconic photograph— or, in a much more recent context, the covid pandemic —with a series of images by Nan Goldin taken from her Brooklyn apartment— appear represented through blurry images.
And perhaps here one of the questions that runs through the entire exhibition reappears: why have we decided that a perfectly finished work must necessarily be better than one that seems incomplete? The history of art is full of what, at the time, was considered a mistake —like Monet's Water Lilies— and which, over time, became a revolution.
But the true revolution proposed by the exhibition, however, may not only be in reclaiming the out-of-focus, but in teaching us to look again: to understand what we consider a mistake. A reminder also offered by the last room, which invites you to lie on a sofa and contemplate the shapes drawn by the clouds through different glasses that distort reality. It seems like a children's game: lying down and recognizing animals, characters or objects in a mass of clouds passing before our eyes.
The exhibition proposes to recover this game that as we transition to adulthood we abandon, to do something that seemed so simple again: stop, look, and let imagination do the rest. Because perhaps we have learned to call everything we don't see clearly an error, and, as with clouds, you just need enough time to discover that there can also be beauty in what is not perfectly in focus.