John Yau blogs about the exhibition Geneviève Asse: Paintings at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on view through September 9, 2013.

Yau writes that “Although Asse works in the domain of monochrome painting and geometric abstraction, she is the opposite of such objective-minded artists as Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. For all of her restraint and rigor, her paintings are intensely subjective, focusing on faint hints of light and barely legible traces of space. You don’t see Asse’s paintings; you adjust to them, as if you woke up in a dark, unfamiliar room. The faint, barely there glow hovers between dawn’s promise and nocturnal memory. Their precedents are J.W.W Turner and Giorgio Morandi. She makes Turner and, at times, even Morandi look heavy-handed.”