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The six works of 2024
From the year that is ending, Beaux Arts has selected six masterpieces. A review of this short list that is as narrow as it is eclectic and willingly primitive heads and high-tech tails. It all starts with…
• Resonance Project: The Cave. We are in Dordogne in the Vézère valley between the decorated walls of the prehistoric cave of Font-de-Gaume. This is where the singers invited by the British visual artist Oliver Beer recorded their oldest musical memory. These nursery rhymes from France, Lebanon, Haiti and Australia have been interwoven to form a polyphony of around thirty minutes forming the soundtrack, as if from the most remote times, of eight immersive videos that plunge visitors into a first era, an original cave, a story from before History. This experience, entitled Resonance Project: The Cave, can be enjoyed at the Lyon Biennale "Les voix des fleuves" until January 5.
Resonance Project: The Cave by Oliver Beer
• Nostalgia. It is an oil on canvas of 122 x 152.5 cm. It is called Nostalgia and was visible this year as part of the exhibition entitled Richard Mayhew – Inner Terrains which was held at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Richard Mayhew is this poet painter who said: "I want the essence of the soul to be found on the canvas". Nostalgia represents a landscape made of vibrant reds and greens which still sketch the edge of a forest as if solarized, blurred, taken out of reality. This primary physical reality dissolves in a painting haunted by the Native American and African ancestry of the artist wanting to capture in a mystical work the emotions therefore, but also the moods and the music of the earth.
Nostalgia by Richard Mayhew
• Idioms. They look like they came from the world of Daft Punk with a golden mask redesigned by Brancusi. These seven figures that haunt the entire exhibition at Punta della Dogana are made of plastic, copper, steel, nylon, aluminum, PVC foam, rubber and metal. They are the Idioms of Pierre Huyghe who praises their superhuman sensitivity by revealing that they are aware in particular of the pH of the ambient air. They are called Idioms because the artificial intelligence that inhabits them develops within them an original and strange language that develops by capturing words from all over the world from visitors who thus feed them with sounds like one discreetly feeds animals in a zoo.
Idioms by Pierre Huyghe
• Stirs. The journey into the limbo of time is also the model in which artistic creation has been molded. For the 125th Gwangju Biennale “Pandori A – Soundscape of the 21st Century”, Marguerite Humeau has composed a sumptuous staging that seems to shelter an antediluvian microbial life bathed in the light of blown glass spheres. The ambition of the installation is nothing less than to take us back 33 million years in time in a decor that is nevertheless ultra-high-tech and to experimental music inspired by the Korean tradition of pansori.
Sculpture by Marguerite Humeau
• A Conversation With the Sun by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. This conversation with the sun will have lasted only a few days. But when the exhibition Particles of Night that retraces it is completed on January 6, it will have left an indelible mark on the minds and bodies of those who have had the chance to experience it. Everything takes place on the stage of the Centre Pompidou theater where visitors are first greeted by images of sleepers then surrounded by a crowd equipped with VR headsets before being invited to wear one themselves to find themselves immersed in a jungle and a ballet of dizzying gold and black suns. And it is with an explosion promised to be gentle that this singular and poetic conversation with the stars ends.
Illustration: A Conversation With the Sun by Apichatpong Weerasethakul
© Theater Commons Tokyo '24 / photo: Shun Sato (Photo provided by Bozar Brussels)
• Membrane by Philippe Parreno. Attention hypersensitive object! This porous membrane with all the dimensions that surround it was in fact a tower placed in the garden of the Beyeler Foundation as part of the experimental summer exhibition of the Swiss cultural institution. This cybernetic structure was equipped with heightened sensorimotor capacities that allowed it to perceive vibrations of all kinds in its environment. It also had a generative language processing thanks to which these perceptions were transcribed into an idiom called "delta A". With Membrane, art becomes science but this science becomes fiction.
Illustration: Membrane by Philippe Parreno.
The five hopes of 2024
Even more than the confirmed values, it is obviously the hopes of the year presented by Beaux Art that hold all our attention at ARTactif. We look at them necessarily thinking of you.
• Exonaut Horizon by Jean-Marie Appriou was on view at the Perrotin gallery. The object measures 202 x 120 x 98cm. On the aluminum side, it could be two bodies of Egyptian statues, arms crossed. But on the bronze and blown glass side, we have two helmeted astronaut heads that come to top the whole by doubling the perception. Surrealist? No, not really because the collage makes sense in reality. There is a strange kinship that emerges between the conquest of space and high Antiquity. These two faces of humanity realize the artistic project of making us "immense" and "deeper".
Illustration: Exonaut Horizon by Jean-Marie Appriou
• Night in Arles was presented as part of an exhibition mounted as part of Djabril Boukhenaïssi's residency at the Lee Ufan Arles Foundation. The darkness evoked by its title is a skies where the nocturnal black is represented by an ultra-deep purple. The day here is a chalky sand ground dominating by its mass but dominated in reality. Extracting itself from the night, a moth comes to land there, drawing dunes with its curved wings. The common thread of the exhibition, this disturbing moth haunts all the paintings in the series.
Illustration: À ténèbres by Djabril Boukhenaïssi
Installation view of Djabril Boukhenaïssi's exhibition "À ténèbres" at Lee Ufan Arles, 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Lee Ufan Arles. © Camille Kirnidis.
• Hopeless Sky by Flora Moscovici will never be hung on any picture rail. This monumental horizontal painting created on the ground for the Normandie Impressionniste festival can be discovered by walking through the Hangar à airigibles d'Écausseville or by flying over it aboard the mini-airship filled with helium that the place is equipped with. We then float on this hovering painting. The tachiste rainbow clouds that we skim or overlook change tone according to the whims of the Normandy sky.
Illustration: Hopeless Sky by Flora Moscovici
• Nista spec 1.0 / Nothing Special 1.0 by Nadezda Kircanski, presented at the IAC in Villeurbanne, is an innocuous work only in appearance. At first glance, it is one of those places that one tries to make as impersonal as possible: a doctor's office waiting room. All that is missing are the magazines that have passed their expiry date. Otherwise, everything is there. Starting with lawn-green seats that one would not want at home for anything in the world, arranged in a circular queue around a matching exotic plant. All of this faces a counter that mixes trompe-l'oeil and elements of reality. It is the story of a look in a place made for contemplation alone, a place full of emptiness that pushes one to question the play of reality and its fictional double. A museum space?
Illustration: Nista spec 1.0 / Nothing Special 1.0 by Nadezda Kircanski
• Cairn by Benoît Piéron is a fragment of a melancholic dream. We don't know whether to laugh or cry. On the laughter side, it's a crazy assembly of textiles that make up a monster here and there a comforter, a bat, mannequins, screens. On the grimace side, it's the pain of hundreds of patients - including the artist - that we think of when we recognize in these piles strewn on the floor sheets, pajamas, gowns, overalls, masks and pastel towels populating the hospital environment. It is therefore a pastel pain that we feel when faced with these falsely innocent installations.
Illustration: Cairn by Benoît Piéron
