Monet's triumph of light, water and color is mirrored by the white minimalism of the American painter Robert Ryman. The Musée de l'Orangerie dedicates an exhibition - and an impossible comparison - to Robert Ryman (1930 - 2019) who adds a subtitle to the artist's name "The gaze in action" which gives the title to a large presentation dedicated to the painter, from 1981 on French soil, which confirms, five years after his death, the historical importance of this artist. The Parisian museum, which houses Claude Monet's last masterpiece, the Water Lilies, proves to be the perfectly suitable place for this reinterpretation. Ryman, who always rejected the idea of exhibiting in dialogue with another artist, places himself in the history of painting by questioning every foundation. Like Monet before him, he focuses his research, almost obsessively, on the specificities of his medium, questioning notions of surface, of the limits of the work, of the space in which it is integrated, of the light with which it plays and the duration in which it takes place. It is around these simple notions - surface, limit, space, light, duration - that the narrative of the exhibition develops.
