Two Triangles With Spheres

An emblematic figure of conceptual art, John Baldessari also expressed affinities with the “Picture Generation”, artists who in 1970s America worked with images from advertising and film.

In Two Triangles With Spheres, Baldessari created an interplay of thematic and visual correspondences in the presence of a spatial separation: the spherical motifs in the foreground provide an illusion of a certain unity, while a rupture appears in the background between two anonymous silhouettes, accentuated by the diagonal line that cuts through.

By removing these images from their original context, Baldessari created a new narrative, introducing a fictional quality already latent in the pre-existing elements. This method asks the viewer to question the conventional meanings conveyed by the media and to come up with new interpretations within this complex, dissonant visual composition.

The Pinault Collection first showed this work in 2023 at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, as part of the exhibition Forever Sixties