Marc Desgrandchamps and serendipity

About the "Immortal" exhibition at the MO.CO. in Montpellier until 7 May, and Marc Desgrandchamps' upcoming exhibitions in Dijon, Annecy and Marseille.

In Montpellier until 7 May, the MO.CO. announces the colour: figurative painting is immortal. In any case, this is the name given to the exhibition that offers an ambitious panorama of young French figurative painting in two generations. The exhibition, which is being held for the first time in all of the city's art centres, is organised in two parts. At the MO.CO., emblematic artists of the French scene, born from 1970 to the beginning of the 80s, are presented. This generous and sensitive exhibition pays tribute to painting in its physical, materialist, erotic and romantic aspects. And to MO.CO. Panacea, the new generation of the mid-80s and 90s proposes a plural vision of the future of figurative painting by revisiting the great traditional genres mixed with the contribution of contemporaneity and conceptual issues. In total, 122 painters are exhibited for more than 400 works of contemporary art.

To accompany this ambitious reflection on the challenges of figurative painting, the April issue of Artpress magazine publishes, in addition to the analyses of Marine Schütz, lecturer in contemporary art history, and Romain Mathieu, art critic, as well as the latter's exchange with the two exhibition curators, an interview with Marc Desgrandchamps, whose work will be on view in two places this season: At the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon, which is devoting a retrospective of his last ten years to him from 12 May to 28 August (which will be repeated at the beginning of 2024 at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Marseille), and at the Abbaye de la Fondation Salomon in Annecy from 26 May to 28 August. According to the magazine Artpress, "few artists today support their practice as well as he does with a knowledge of ancient and recent history and with such in-depth reflection". So be it.

Interviewed by Catherine Millet in the April issue of Artpress, the contemporary art magazine she edits, Marc Desgrandchamps recalls that he himself was deeply affected by the exhibitions of works of art organised by the Centre Pompidou around the historical modernity of the first thirty years of the 20th century, at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. Born in 1960 in Sallanches, Haute-Savoie, he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was fascinated by the work of Malevich as a whole: primitivism, cubism, suprematism and kolkhozian figuration. "I was also touched to see that there was a perceptible hesitation on the surface of his canvases, which one does not perceive if one only knows his works through their reproduction," confides the painter and engraver. "For example, the outlines of the white square are uncertain on the white background, as are some of the covered but still visible figures in his later paintings. This hesitation, this trembling, seemed to me to be a departure from the purist modernist interpretation of his work."

At the time, the artist tried to work in line with the movements of groups such as Bazzoka or Figuration Libre, "but the hard, even trashy aspect was always counterbalanced by a fascination for the monumental and the sublime, plastic notions that were sometimes a little vague and heavy. A painter like Beckmann, an immense artist, seen in Paris-Berlin and the Réalismes exhibition, became a real obsession of mine from which I found it difficult to detach myself. Marc Desgrandchamp then found this monumental sublime in the work of contemporary artist Susan Rothenberg, whose artworks he discovered for sale at the Daniel Templon art gallery. "I could see that it was a figurative painting that would have been unimaginable if abstraction had not existed.

At the time, he observed the work of young painters such as Vincent Corpet, Pierre Moignard, Djamal Tatah, Philippe Favier, Denis Laget, Jean-Pierre Giard... But things were not easy for him: he always had the feeling that the works of art he tried to create had all already been created. Not to mention the fact that he will long ponder the words of an art critic who said to him: "It's all over for you, you could have been on the train but you're not, and now, to replace this train, we're going to look for the artists who are going to derail it, and it won't be you, that's how modernism works.

The art critic Catherine Millet remembers that for the preface she wrote for Marc Desgrandchamps' exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 2005, she relied on one of his words, which referred to his painting as "a painting of doubt". This is a good opportunity to ask him if he still doubts as much. "Doubt is not eternal", replied the artist, who was a little tired of these rather reductive words that now stick to him as soon as he talks about his work. "At the same time, it is true that I have spoken of doubt to describe my work (...) Often, things happen by serendipity, that is to say that changes occur by chance and you have to be able to recognise them in order to develop them. It's quite slow."

When Catherine Millet pointed out to him that, in his recent paintings, he manipulates the eye by drawing it to a tiny detail in the distance, using the same process that surrealists such as De Chirico, Tanguy or Dali exploited, Marc Desgrandchamps admitted that "De Chirico is a reference for me, that's for sure, my paintings betray him". It must be said that the first time he heard of this painter, he was 15 years old and was staying in Italy. "I am captivated by the light of these paintings, the atmosphere that emanates from them, and flabbergasted by the casual way in which they are painted. Everything is perfectly in place, but it's done in a haphazard way, and this lack of subtlety ends up producing the greatest subtlety in the doing. I find it magical, I don't understand what alchemy is at work in these paintings. As for Dali, the painter only returned to it after having rejected it once the adolescent infatuation had passed. And even though he doesn't like Yves Tanguy very much, he has the impression that some of his own paintings do indeed resemble the works of this surrealist. "Perhaps a shared fascination for the horizon line that splits the surface?

When the journalist tells him that she does not think much of the young painters who have made a name for themselves in recent years, reproaching them for being far too wise, Marc Desgrandchamps defends them. "Perhaps most of these artists just have a different idea of provocation or transgression. And he mentions some of those who have interested him the most: Jean-Xavier Renaud, Stéphane Pencréac'h, Florence Reymond, Johann Rivat, Laurent Proux... But also Marie-Anita Gaube, Eva Nielsen, Mireille Blanc, Marine Wallon, Christine Safa, Simon Martin, Jérémy Liron, Thomas Lévy-Lasne, Mathieu Cherkit, Ymane Chabi-Gara, Guillaume Bresson, Manon Vargas, Raphaëlle Bertran, Maude Maris, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Elené Shatberashvili, Mathilde Denize, Samuel Richardot...

Illustration : © Daniel Clarke, Walla Walla Dream, 2008 - Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Françoise Besson - Photo credit: Daniel Clarke