VOIR EN PEINTURE

For a long time considered the poor relative of contemporary creation, painting is currently a chosen and claimed medium by many young artists who renew its appeal. In recent decades, while few art centers, FRACs, or museums dedicated their walls to it, a few institutions – among which the partner museums of this exhibition are prominent – have been able to defend painters from different generations. Within the Fine Arts schools, which for a long time had few painters among their faculty, it is thanks to a few “outsiders” that this art continues to be taught. Around these artists, such as Denis Laget in Saint-Étienne, Jean-Michel Alberola, Philippe Cognée, and François Boisrond, Nina Childress in Paris, Laurent Proux in Toulouse, Marc Desgrandchamps in Lyon, or François Maurige, François Perrodin, and Guillaume Pinard in Rennes, the current generation further enriches the pictorial language. The exhibition will highlight these practices that claim a new history painting or establish connections with literature or art history, around the work of about thirty painters born in the 1980s. Their freshly created works, selected by the curator directly from the secrecy of the studio, bear the mark of the “physicality” of painting, a medium that naturally involves a “mental thing” but also a physical presence, dependent on intrinsic elements (such as dimensions, support, material, or colors of the artwork) but also on external factors that determine its conditions of presentation on the wall and its relationship to the surrounding space.