Photographs to close a museum

The Centre Pompidou in Paris will close for five years for renovations, and it couldn't have closed in a more spectacular way: in March it began by closing the library, a few days later the permanent collection, and during this summer and until September, the temporary exhibitions, the bookstore, and the shop. With one exception: the library, which no longer operates as such, will be open to the public from June 13 to September 22 in an exceptional way, intervening in an anthological exhibition by the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, designed specifically for this space, with the title Rien ne nuevos y preparar − Tout nuevos y preparar (Nothing prepared us – Everything prepared us).

I must confess that before seeing this exhibition I was unfamiliar with Tillmans's work. Or rather: I was familiar with it, but I didn't know it was his. I was impressed from the very beginning, for example, by the novel's cover. A place for Mungo, by Douglas Stuart, published in Catalan by Edicions in 1984 and translated by Núria Busquet Molist, in which two boys eat each other's mouths voraciously, their sideburns sweaty, one wearing a faded T-shirt and the other a blue tracksuit. A cover photograph, The Cock (Kiss) (2002), which the editors of all the translations of the novel have had the good sense to reproduce. And I also knew the cover of Frank Ocean's latest album, Blonde (2016), a very sensual image of the singer with green-dyed hair and a suggestive and disturbing band-aid on one finger, but I didn't know it was a work by Tillmans either, Frank, in the Shower (2015).

The exhibition by Wolfgang Tillmans (Remscheid, 1968), which can be seen these days in Paris, is, therefore, a good example of that art that is there, but that does not always stand out. That manages to capture the spirit of an era, its aesthetics, so much that it sometimes requires some perspective to be appreciated. Tillmans is an avid portraitist of marginalized people and groups, especially the collective queer, of young people and the liminal spaces they inhabit, semi-clandestinely, between the party and the community. It's a kind of safari through the more quinqui side of life, through the outskirts of European capitals and their networks of abandoned industrial warehouses, through a world packed with ephebes dressed in Adidas socks and tracksuits. It's also a highly original treatment of the naked body that recalls the delicious Dreaming of gods (1993), by Toni Catany, as well as a concern for veracity, or at least suggesting it, which brings his art closer to photojournalism or visual chronicle, but never quite achieves it. Wolfgang Tillmans' photography is the most radical contemporaneity mixed with timeless studies of form and color, still and live lifes, urban friezes, portraits of artists and unknown faces, almost stolen visions that are always stimulating. And I think he must be very good, to be able to close a museum opening so many perspectives. Now, we'll have to wait.