The Pompidou Centre

Who are you, you tiny people down there, who I can cover just by raising my thumb to the window pane? Do you know, you there, down on the cobbles, with your lunch, your talk and your embraces, that Paris stretches out behind you in all its glory? Somewhere behind the shops and cafés there are golden domes that catch the sun, tall archways and massive churches, all being revealed to me now as I go up and up. But not for you. You sitting on the cold stones, you have made your own world in barely a square foot of space, your Paris, small amongst the greatness.

Inside the cocoon of the Pompidou Centre there is another world, too. A world of culture, of art and of discovery and yet a world never far removed from the rest of the city. Turn a corner and you find a window, a view, light from the “City of Light” seeping in to split your focus. Inside or outside? Which beauty shall I feed on at this moment? There is little room for disengagement here. Decisions must be made. A full appreciation of the present, of where you are and the art all around, is never lost.

The collection held there is vast and diverse, attracting a wide range of people: the young, the old, the Parisian and the faraway wanderer. The wealth of available space lends itself to the exhibition of works executed on a grand scale, things that might struggle to find a home in more averagely proportioned galleries. Thus there are whole rooms given over to installations, like the one lined with thick folds of felt that dulled every sound, even the gentle sighs of respiration. Another space was painted and carpeted in psychedelic hues, swirling about in mind bending patterns, while a third was rendered in monochrome but had disconcertingly uneven, rock-like flooring. On one central gallery wall hung a gigantic painting by Julian Schnabel, with wide, confident brush sweeps in muted browns and pinks reminding me of why I loved his film adaptation of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” so much. I marvelled at the achievement of the artist turned director, seeing echoes of each identity in the work before me.

The temporary exhibitions had been curated with care, showcasing very different aspects of the creative life. The detailed models made by the designer Martin Szekely as part of the process of realising objects that solved practical problems were fascinating. He didn't want to draw his ideas in pen and ink, eschewing the abstract in favour of actually manufacturing “things” in three dimensions. So we were presented with furniture, television equipment and even a shoe measuring device in perspex cases or on plinths, real world objects elevated to the level of purely aesthetic sculptures. In a final, witty touch (perhaps coincidental) they were displayed next to that most practical and necessary object of all, the public lavatory. Their presence in full view of the queue for the facilities would have no doubt pleased their creator.

Upstairs, dark and enclosed to protect it from the glare of the very best top floor panoramic views, was an exhibition about Edvard Munch. There was no “Scream” here – his most famous work was not at the centre of this retrospective. Instead the curators showed Munch's work process and how he often revisited specific subjects as well as themes. The presence of exceptionally dark undertones in his output was brought to the fore. He liked to paint murders, fights and robberies, as well as having something of an obsession with himself when sick. He created many self-portraits in hospitals and clinics, and in his old age tried to chronicle his troubled eyesight and in particular his haemorrhage-induced, disturbing visions with painstaking accuracy.

Munch was a familiar artist to me, but I had never heard of Christian Dotremont before. His simple, black and white pieces were revelatory. He was a writer and a poet, but one who saw the power of words everywhere, not just in some clichéd way as if speaking of “the poetry of nature”, but in a very visual manner. The shape and curve of letter forms spoke to him from seemingly every object or surface. He made art at times by simply writing with a twig in snow and ice, but his ink-on-paper calligraphy works or “logograms” are the most beautiful. They are beautiful in themselves before they transcend the pictorial element to become poems, sentences to be read and interpreted as literature. Dotremont could create little written worlds or stories and make them aesthetically pleasing pictures. He had a unique way of seeing the world and an extraordinary talent, but one that exists in a small way in all of us. We find ourselves planted in places, adrift in huge cities that make us feel very small and insignificant, but we go on being. Every day we make our own stories in our own little safe spaces that contribute to the great, big whole. We get up, we walk about, move, speak, converse, shove our hands into our pockets or into the hand of another. That's life. That's art. It's a visual story and a verbal one.

Look at the Pompidou Centre, inside and out. The whole place is a book, not just a paragraph or a sentence. It shouts with its red and blue heating ducts; it whispers through the soft glide of its escalators. In its glass it reflects the city around it from the outside and invites it in through the windows to its cavernous internal spaces. So, you there, you people sitting on its concourse, doing what you do, being watched by me on the escalator. I know who you are. You are art. You are poetry. We all are.