Attention image!

What if the only image to keep in the June issue of Beaux-Arts was an advertisement?

That would be messy, of course, because advertising in this kind of medium has only two possible functions.  It allows art magazines to keep their prices affordable, which has become crucial at a time when it is so easy to get a free art news magazine on the Net and networks. Without this extra income, their subscription services may close. But all this is behind the scenes, which we all prefer to forget. Ostrich selfishness.

On the front side, advertising is mainly used here as a means of informing about exhibition dates as well as book and film releases that give, through a clever mix of styles, the delicious feeling that art is still alive. With artistic dignity, all these advertisements that intersperse images within images throughout the pages always have the good taste to avoid hard selling. It is true that their visuals are most often works presented in the exhibitions they promote. A promo on a Picasso would be a small sacrilege.

The advertising departments or agencies that produce these ads therefore take particular care in the creation of the images used if they want to look good in such a high-profile context. A real work of art! Graphic designers! Artists?

And suddenly, without warning, an ad image appears here or there, in Beaux-Arts this month in fact, which takes art at its own game. But no one is forcing today's artists to follow the lead of the general public, who prefer to have a "sensory experience" rather than an encounter with works of art in the bare confines of a gallery or museum.

The poster for the exhibition "The Imaginary Sea" borders on genius in this sense. Firstly, it creates a vacuum around it, precisely by exposing the sea-blue vacuum. This creates a draught. She is the only one you see. It's good advertising! An eye catcher. But don't all paintings claim to have a greater power of attraction than wallpaper?

At first, seen from a distance, it is an abstract image. A Klein. The fall of the naked man who represents us in this frame; hooks us and scotches us. The composition makes us the ones falling. This is the joyful point of view from which we are invited to explore the image. This automated identification is a trap. It is terribly disturbing but devilishly beautiful. Our fall seems to turn water into sky. Unable to swim between the clouds, we sink to earth. The drowning of Icarus.

The art of painting with the same brush, taking in the same lens and sculpting in the same block the grandeur of nature and the tragic beauty of human fate. Aware that he is nothing in this giant setting. An ant thrown into Besson's Big Blue. How far will it fall?  This misguided voodoo doll surely doesn't imagine that we are watching it sink into our Freudian darkness. Fascinated.

Rare are the images in art magazines from which we come out so wet. Semiologists speak of "visuals" to designate this type of image that does not leave one indifferent. It's an art form.

Illustration: Poster for the exhibition The Imaginary Sea - 2021 Villa Carmignac - Hyères - Until 17 October