Sometimes a painting touches you without you knowing the name of the artist, or even expecting to see his exhibition.
We are at the Musée d'Orsay for another reason, that afternoon, and suddenly this name in big letters, Nathanaëlle Herbelin.
Who is it ?
You have to regularly visit art galleries to know this young woman born in 1989, this is not our case, and first of all, what is she doing in the Nabis rooms, the immense Bonnard, Vuillard or Vallotton of the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th?
The mixture of contemporary painting and classics often annoys us.
A fashion that gives museums a trendy, falsely up-to-date, often fake touch.
But there, a direct blow to the plexus.
These colors, these poses, these faces, these bodies, these couples, these hugs, this way of sleeping together, of embracing each other, in a very everyday intimacy, speak to the heart, to the guts, to the soul in pain or not, to everything that vibrates in a human body, its brain and the rest.
His painting holds up.
“Madeleine and Clément”, version 2 (2020).
Oil on canvas, 55 x 30 cm. Patricia and Philippe Jousse collection.
Adagp, Paris, 2024
In this subtle but a priori formidable, even pretentious, exercise of inserting her works from 2020 to 2023 among those of the great masters, Nathanaëlle Herbelin ensures, assumes, even knocks out the debate with her fervor.
Bonnard poses his masterpiece of “Woman with a Cat”.
She responds with a young girl petting her pocket feline at the table, and it matches.
She does not pastiche, she takes her own momentum, her time, her way.
His painting holds the breath of love
Besides, the artist is in the theaters that day.
Following a painter for a moment in a very famous museum turns out to be disconcerting and fascinating.
The young woman knows it by heart and moves around like a blind person who “feels” the paintings.
She is not talking about Orsay, but about “Christophe’s skirmish”,
President Christophe Leribault
(who has just been appointed to the Palace of Versailles).
In a museum that is constantly changing but where occasional visitors hardly notice the small differences, the artist knows exactly which famous painting has changed place and when.
A deep intimacy with those who inspire him.
Nathanaëlle Herbelin's painting is like a first aid kit, a lover's breath, mouth-to-mouth.
She would resurrect a dead person or almost through the celebration of domestic life, of these moments of nothing, of everything, hugging her sister or her lover, taking a bath, or, pregnant, a shower.
The Franco-Israeli who lives in Paris says it very well: “I try to make the viewer forget, even for a moment, their ruminations, their anxiety, their solitude, and for them to blend into my paintings.
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Banal scenes but full of clues
Are there so many artists who think of us, of what would do us good, or even comfort us, when entering a museum?
She tells stories: a woman and her infant bathing, or waxing, a couple separated by a partition, confinement and incommunicability.
We can understand, through the title of a painting or the shadow of a glance, that it will soon be over.
A couple who are hugging, another who may have argued or who, by arrangement, are sleeping apart that night.
Our imagination is stimulated by banal scenes but full of clues.
The echo chamber with similar themes in Bonnard and the couple he formed with his muse Marthe even makes the latter more contemporary, more violent, because all these colors scream.
Bonnard's red is a bit like the first blood shed in a duel.
A very sweet duel.
Nathanaëlle Herbelin finds her place at the Musée d'Orsay because she likes what painters practiced at the time: looking at models again and again, handling techniques with virtuosity.
The Nabis celebrated domestic intimacy.
It too, but without their very busy, artistic bourgeois decorations.
Her interiors are almost bare – like the bodies sometimes – and computers have replaced the fruit baskets.
She paints rooms that we could have walked through, couples that we could have formed.
Orsay spoils her by even selling a magnet of her little white cat and bookmarks of a couple kissing in the summer night or a maternity ward.
Derivative products like for a great painter.
In Orsay, there are not only the Impressionists, but also the discovery of a thirty-year-old artist who makes your day, your week or more.
This secret of loving life even in its risks and sharing it, from one color to another.
Nathanaëlle Herbelin,
“Being here is a splendor”, Musée d'Orsay (Paris 7th), until June 30, 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m. except Monday, 13-16 euros.