Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic A pale, attenuated sentry greets visitors who climb the stairs of the Institut Giacometti in Paris this summer, dabs of copper-red and black highlighting her craggy, etiolated flesh. One eye is open, the other closed; a smear on her chin could be a dimple. Is she winking? Or wounded? In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man may be king, but this lady is a shattered sovereign, whispering frailty and exhaustion from every bronze pore. Yet she remains upright, alert and watching. A flawed visionary for our troubled times, those daubs and dribbles of colour intensifying her fragility. Such imperfections deny her a priestly status but make her simultaneously prophet, witness and compadre.Who knew there was anything new to say about Giacometti (1901-66), described in 2017 by Tate curator Frances Morris as the artist who “came to define a new way of thinking about humanity”? His gift for forging skeletal figures who exude a primordial loneliness made his oeuvre the artistic blueprint for the existential crisis that afflicted a world scarred by Auschwitz and Hiroshima.On the one hand, this show in Paris stamps his reputation once more on to the canon. But it also sheds revelatory light on his practice. As the subtitle, “Not to Talk of Painted Sculptures”, teasingly hints, it concentrates on the artist’s custom of adding colour to his sculptures, in particular the plaster casts that often preceded the final bronze.Around the corner from the one-eyed seer, in the Institut’s main gallery, painted ladies await. To describe Giacometti’s “Femmes de Venise” as such feels like sacrilege. Made for the Venice Biennale, where Giacometti showed in the French pavilion in 1956, these plaster sculptures are among his most renowned. With their ram-rod straight silhouettes, swanlike necks and waists, their faces gazing into some mystical horizon, they are often regarded as models of “iconic dignity”, as Colm Tóibín once wrote of Giacometti’s art.But this exhibition encourages us to observe the chocolate-brown ink that tints those blistered, tactile bodies. The colours gather in the furrows and gleam on the ridges where the artist has worked the clay with his fingers, diffusing the women’s remoteness and lending them a corporeal vulnerability.The painted nature of the “Femmes de Venise” has been hiding in plain sight for a while. After the six plasters were shown in Venice at the 1956 Biennale, they were stored for decades by the Fondation Alberto et Annette Giacometti in Paris — which also oversees the Institut — until they were restored by conservators whose work uncovered the original paint that had been hidden beneath shellac. In 2017, the six Venice plasters were shown at Tate Modern in its Giacometti show.That exhibition was critically applauded yet the colour on the plasters was treated as just one more feature of Giacometti’s complex process. This time, the Institut concentrates on those painted marks. By including “Head of a Child” (1917-18) — his crystalline face fresh as its daisy-yellow wash, made when the artist was just 16 — the show demonstrates that colouring his plasters was always crucial to his practice. (Giacometti also painted around 60 bronzes, but collectors rarely showed enthusiasm.)From the mid-1920s, when Giacometti was experimenting with avant-garde forms, the Institut proffers “Couple” (1925-27), a rough-hewn chunk of plaster, anonymous limbs compressed together, splashed with rose pink and sky blue. Suggesting that romance is a suffocating business, it recalls both Brancusi’s rapturous but airless 1907 masterpiece “The Kiss” and the marble-caged “Prisoners” of Michelangelo.For Giacometti, the task was more complicated. After a revelation in a Parisian movie theatre, he realised that his mission was to illuminate “the third dimension, space”. Yet his awareness of, as he put it, “the distance which separated us” was constantly in tension with his “desire to cross it”. That suppressed longing for intimacy hums through this exhibition’s varied gathering. Nowhere is it clearer than in the tiny portrait sculptures of his close circle, such as his wife Annette, who exudes proud determination, her red dress in vibrant contrast to her pale face and dark mop of hair.Did Giacometti deliberately use paint to deliver a more emotional sensibility? Of his decision to paint a bronze in 1950 — “The Cage”, on show here — he wrote simply that paint “is the only thing that needed doing, I thought them in colour, they must be in that colour and not any other”.In truth, Giacometti, whose father was a painter, had always drawn and painted. As his friend Jean-Paul Sartre put it: “Sculpting as others paint, painting as others sculpture [sic], is he a painter? Is he a sculptor? Neither, both.”The Institut’s show brims with two-dimensional works, including a riveting encounter between the sculptures “The Cage” and “Four Figurines of London Version A” (1965) — the plaster figures united here for the first time with their original bronze plinth — and a panel of studio wall (remounted on canvas) covered in sketches for these works and one other.The sculptural figurines — naked, emaciated women, their beige bodies highlighted with black strokes — perch precariously on their ledge. Are they waiting to be bought? Rescued? Dissected? In the cage, one of the open-sided cuboid structures Giacometti often used, a slender figure grasps the bars as if clamouring for escape.Next to these desperate souls, the mural evokes a haunted house inhabited by spectral inmates — faceless custodians loom over the four women; the caged figure seems poised to leap from a precipice — who emanate like smoke through a mist of grey and red lines. This torment is very different from the “iconic dignity” of which Tóibín wrote. It is as if the act of painting, whether on canvas or plaster, plugged Giacometti viscerally into the anguish behind his efforts to articulate the void that menaces human existence.That void was mortality. A key moment for Giacometti came in the mid-1940s when he sensed that “all the living were dead”. Little wonder he was so drawn to the art of ancient Egypt, where images of the dead were made specifically to usher them into the afterlife. One of the most telling objects in this show is “Head of a Man on a Rod” (1949-51). A narrow, terracotta-hued face under dark hair, eyes rimmed with black to exacerbate their whites, he is a ringer for one of the Fayum portraits, which Giacometti copied, that were laid on mummies.Given such concerns, you might fear this exhibition will provoke sadness. In truth, it offers unexpected, exhilarating solace. To November 3, fondation-giacometti.frFind out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
