In Venice five "looks" for Henri Cartier-Bresson

VENICE - A man rests his chin on a wall, staring straight ahead; next, another, with a thick mustache, has his eyes on something that is out of the picture, which the black and white photo that portrays them does not show. It is an image created in 1932 in Brussels by Henri Cartier-Bresson, one of the masters of world photography. It is a double "portrait" that seems to have all the key elements of the exhibition dedicated to the French photographer, considered a pioneer of "photojournalism", at Palazzo Grassi, one of the two venues from the Pinault Collection.

There is the essence of a man who tells a story in every shot - "my Leica told me that life is immediate and dazzling" - but also that "game" of looks that opens the way to an exhibition that, like a "grand jeu" - says the subtitle - it is made of choices - even with duplicates - deriving from five different ways of looking at and contextualizing the work of Cartier-Bresson.

As from a "basket" of wonders, the five exceptional curators - Javier Cercas, Wim Wenders, Sylvie Aubenas, Annie Leibowitz and Francois Pinault himself - have chosen to present "their" Cartier-Bresson choosing from 385 photos that same photographer had selected in 1973 at the request of friends John and Dominique de Menil. Free to choose the images, the frames, the colors of the walls, the "narrative" contexts, the five - with Matthieu Humery general curator of the "game" - offer an exhibition in the exhibition. If on the one hand, in fact, the strength of Cartier-Bresson dominates, on the other there is the weight of the choices, of the looks now aimed at people, now to the daily contexts, and the way of presenting them, as for Wenders who brings the all almost on a cinematographic level, enough to make a nine-minute short with his narrative voice.

On the upper floor of Palazzo Grassi - again until March 21 next year - there is the monographic exhibition dedicated to Youssef Nabil, an Egyptian artist whose works range from photography, painting, video and installations; all signs of a distant reality, of a legendary Egypt that is fading, bringing the problems affecting the Middle East to the fore in a dreamlike form. In March 2021, Palazzo Grassi will then close for plant engineering works that will last seven months.

No closure, however, for Punta della Dogana, which after the exhibition that opens Saturday, "Untitled, 2020. Three glances on today's art", conceived and curated by Carolibne Bourgeois, by the artist and art historian Muna El Fituri and by the artist Thomas Houseago, on March 21 next year he will present an exhibition by Brauce Nauman that takes its name from one of his works, "Contrapposto Studies", curated by Carlos Basualdo.