"The World As It Goes" is the title of the new exhibition of works from the Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce, one that, as its name suggests, mirrors the sad state of the world. It shows one of the most interesting sides of the collection: Its dark, black humoristic and satirical dimension. The Peter Doig's Gauguin-style bather, complete with palm trees and white boxer shorts, featured on the poster and catalog cover should only be understood as an antiphrasis: This image of tropical paradise is an illusion.

The selection occupies all of the Bourse's available space: Around a hundred works from all modes of visual creation by some 30 artists, living or recently deceased, of all nationalities and generations. By starting your visit on the second floor, you'll immediately come across the wreckage of a crashed Ferrari Dino that Bertrand Lavier rescued from the scrapyard to turn into a contemporary allegory, halfway between Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend (1967) and David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), among other possible cinematic references. But one might also be reminded of Andy Warhol's no-less cruel pictures of car crashes.

Debilitating spectacle

If you start on the first floor, you will encounter two rooms where mannequins of old men, bearded like prophets, are moving very slowly on automated wheelchairs. Their clothes hint at their religion or past life: Red Army veteran, rabbi, imam, pope, banker, etc. This debilitating spectacle was conceived in 2007 by the Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. It was shown at the Paris Conciergerie in 2013 and remains just as relevant more than 10 years later, if not more so, given current events. To compound the effect, two monumental black-and-white tapestries by Goshka Macuga are hung on the walls: The disasters of the Middle East and, symmetrically, the West's amiable expressions of good conscience.

It doesn't fully matter which way you decide to go, the tone is set and omnipresent: Maurizio Cattelan's Hitler-praying Him; Franz West's huge, grotesque plaster Lemurenköpfe (1947-2012) – lemurs is how Ernst Jünger used to refer to Nazis in his diary of the war years; Rosemarie Trockel's sculptures, one of which includes a cut of meat – like a Soutine made of ceramics - and the other a head against which an iron is applied; the ceramics of monstrous heads by the excellent Austrian pop artist Kiki Kogelnik (1935-1997) or Doris Salcedo's pile of neatly folded white shirts pierced by two long steel rebars being effective demonstrations of it.

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