Figurative painting is contemporary
About the exhibition "Voir en peinture. La Jeune Figuration en France", which runs until 28 May at the Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Les Sables-d'Olonne.
Long considered the poor relation of contemporary creation, painting is currently a medium chosen and claimed by many young artists who are renewing its appeal. One only has to look around art galleries and contemporary art fairs to see that the works of art for sale are increasingly figurative, in the sense that they represent figures, objects or landscapes, but always expressing something more. For a successful figurative painting is one that carries as much emotional charge, symbolism and second degree as an abstract painting. Figurative painting and abstract painting are therefore not enemy sisters. The supposed antagonism between figurative and contemporary art is no longer relevant. And today we are grateful to figurative painters such as Bernard Buffet and later Robert Combas for having maintained the course by brilliantly renewing figurative painting.
In recent decades, while few art centres, FRACs or museums have devoted their walls to it, a few institutions - among which the MASC figures prominently - have been able to defend painters of different generations. Within the schools of Fine Arts, which for a long time had few painters on their teaching staffs, 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, new generations have enriched the pictorial language.
The MASC exhibition highlights these practices, which claim a new historical painting or weave links with literature or art history, around the work of some thirty painters born in the 1980s.
Their works, freshly made and chosen by the curator directly in the secrecy of the studio, bear the mark of the "physicality" of painting, a medium which of course implies a "cosa mentale" but also a physical presence, dependent on intrinsic elements (such as the dimensions, the support, the material or the colours of the work) but also on external factors which determine the conditions of its presentation on the picture rail and its relationship to the surrounding space.
Works by Marion Bataillard, Louise Belin and others are on view at the MASC: Marion Bataillard, Louise Belin, Guillaume Bresson, Nadjib Ben Ali, Mireille Blanc, Elvire Caillon, Ymane Chabi-Gara, Clémentine Chalançon, Mathieu Cherkit, Corinne Chotycki, Jean Claracq, Cyril Duret, Valentin Guichaux, Aurélie de Heinzelin, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Simon Leroux, Thomas Levy-Lasne, Jérémy Liron, Clémentine Margheriti, Simon Martin, Eva Nielsen, Ainaz Nosrat, Marius Pons de Vincent, Laurent Proux, Shu Rui, Christine Safa, Louise Sartor, Manon Vargas, Marine Wallon, Miranda Webster
"There is no longer any doubt that the medium has become a topical practice," notes Marine Schütz in her analysis entitled "Le retour du retour" (The return of the return), published this month in the contemporary art magazine Artpress. The lecturer in contemporary art history at the University of Picardie Jules Verne, whose research focuses on contemporary drawing, pop art and contemporary artistic productions around colonial memory, observes that "exhibitions on figuration are multiplying, particularly in Great Britain. The interest in a figuration that allows artists to understand their time and to negotiate the anxiety of the virtual clearly guides the purpose of the exhibition currently on view in Les Sables-d'Olonne, but which has also been organised by the Estrine Museum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence and the Fine Arts Museum in Dole. "Faced with the saturation of images, painting is undoubtedly a response to this overflow with its slowness, its silence, its intensity, its gravity," writes Anne Dary, the exhibition's scientific curator.
As Marine Schütz points out, "the idea that artists choose painting for its capacity, through its own materiality, to put in tension the dynamics of temporal flux and mass images that characterise the era is an old motif. In 2000, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh saw it as a sign of the transformations of art in a post-capitalist context, when he described the art of "disfiguration" in Raymond Pettibon", the American visual artist who emerged from the punk-rock scene. "The monumental tone of the historical compositions that Guillaume Bresson appropriates in his urban scenes echoes the more or less explicit quotations that artists make from the history of painting. In this respect, Didier Semin's comparison in the exhibition catalogue between Marion Bataillard's Tout s'accomplit (2020-21) and William Holman Hunt's Christ and the Two Marys (1847/97) is very illuminating. He points out the repetition of the rainbow motif, treated in the Ellsworth Kelly style, and the radiance of the main figure. In this festive scene, Marion Bataillard explores the infinite possibility that painting offers to inscribe contemporary appearances in the longer time frame of art history.
Like the seasons, we know that everything works in cycles. It is therefore not surprising that landscape painting is once again attracting the attention of young artists. Especially at a time when the environment is the focus of attention. "Where Documenta 13 (2012) exposed the importance of post-media techniques for probing the anthropocene turn, painting is nonetheless emerging as a field that some, like Thomas Lévy-Lasne, are reappropriating in the light of ecological convictions. The execution of coloured fields produced on large formats (Jérémy Liron) or washed surfaces (Nathanaëlle Herbelin) translate the action on the form of processes based on memory and observation of nature. Louise Belin, Valentin Guichaux and Mathieu Cherkit all choose to experiment with the genre of the landscape at first hand, using processes that very precisely challenge the conditioning imposed on the eye by the permanent circulation of found images.
If painting was so mocked in art schools in the 1980s, it was because the new media brought a gigantic breath of fresh air. But things are naturally shifting back into balance. Works of art for sale from the current French figurative scene are almost systematically found on the walls of the most renowned art galleries when their painters come out of a reputable studio, such as those of Philippe Cognée, Tim Eitel, Jean-Michel Alberola, François Boisrond, Nina Childress, Daniel Schlier, Loïc Raguénès, Piotr Klemensiewicz or Denis Laget.
Illustration : graphic design : Philippe Ducat - Ville des Sables d'Olonne