The Pine Outgrows the Concrete: "Monet, Renoir… Chagall" at Bunker de Lumières

Paul Signac's pine at Saint-Tropez spreads across a concrete wall several metres high. The dots of colour he painted it with grow to the size of a palm, and up close the tree looks like a mosaic. In 2022 Bunker de Lumières in Seongsan, on Jeju, was showing the projection programme "Monet, Renoir… Chagall". It was at its best where the painting was already made of dots, flat colour and light, and at its weakest with the painters whose names come first.

The building is a former state communications bunker with thick concrete walls and about 3,000 square metres of floor. It has been in private hands since 2012. After Klimt and Van Gogh, the Mediterranean show was its third major programme. According to the announcement it ran in seven sequences over about 40 minutes and used more than 500 works, followed by a short programme on Paul Klee.

The strongest section belongs to Chagall's stained glass. The lead lines become black strokes running over walls and floor, and the blue fills the whole hall. The floor is glossy and reflects the windows a second time. In a side corridor visitors sit against the wall and become part of the picture. A church window is made for light passing through colour, so it loses less in projection than an oil painting does.

Later, green and yellow fields from Chagall's paintings flow over the walls and a head surfaces on the floor. A terraced landscape with steps and a balustrade settles onto the cube in the middle of the hall and carries on along the wall behind it. This works because the projection takes the edges of the room into account.

Painting that depends on the hand is where the format runs out. A band of water and sky runs round the entire hall, very wide and very flat, and little of the brushwork survives the enlargement. Outside the hall some of the motifs appear again as large printed panels: a woman with a green parasol, familiar from Monet, and a harbour with boats and bathers. You see more of the pictures there than inside.

As a show about Monet and Renoir it was weak. As a room for Chagall and Signac it was good. Anyone who has never seen the Chagall windows in Reims or Jerusalem gets an idea here of how colour glows when light comes through it. The light just comes from projectors in the ceiling, while outside the Jeju sun is shining.

"Monet, Renoir… Chagall" was at Bunker de Lumières, Seongsan, Jeju, in 2021 and 2022.