On the front: the geography of contemporary painting

 

 

Sur le front (On the front) is a constellation of works each of which invites us to rethink and modify the way we read the image. Frontality as formal language and contemporary criticism reactivates, through the use of various media, an alternative reading of the image on the social and pictorial fronts. This frontality becomes militant action when it comes to defending citizens’ entitlements and views, while at the same time it demarcates geographic and temporal borders in the pictorial space.

 

The pictorial front represented by the works of Audrey Nervi, Eric Tabuchi, Mounir Fatmi and Sandrine Fallet is predominantly social in nature. These artists catalogue geopolitical realms and frontally subvert the code we use to read social space. All of these artists reclaim pictorial codes through the use of juxtaposition, superposition and displacement, thus allowing the image to assume a rebellious stance and inviting us to reconsider, in a frontal manner, our relationship with private space, public space and the entire system of consumption.

 

Sandrine Fallet’s installation consists of three buildings placed on rollers shopping cart-style, emblems of a trilogy in which human beings are mere consumer products.

 

Based on photographic images of an unauthorized rave party, Audrey Nervi’s Z.A.T (Zone d'Autonomie Temporaire) (Temporary autonomous zone) series has been a leitmotif of her work for some three years now. Nervi’s paintings are first and foremost closeups of the world as she sees it, and are not concerned to document that world as it actually is. Mounir Fatmi reestablishes bonds between communities. The problem of the Other is a central element in his work, which takes as its starting point the issue of freedom of expression and the power of media images – images which he seeks to liberate by situating them on the humanistic front.

Eric Tabuchi uses photography to call into question the concepts of hybridism and cross-breeding. He builds a new identity in a mural installation – a melange of maps, surfaces and the geological strata of geopolitical realms.

 

The value of the pictorial front represented by the work of Christophe Baudson, Jean-Rémy Papleux, Richard Tronson, Florent Mattei, Luc Léotoing and Cédric Teisseire stems from the historicity of the pictorial space.

Christophe Baudson relocates borders, pixellizing images in paint, importing images from the grid into the painting’s image and pairing these images of women with a white monochrome field. The titles of his diptychs – Les filles…peinture à forte sexualité (Girls...painting charged with sexuality) Robe rouge (Red dress) – translate the operant duality of a work of limitless lability.

Jean-Rémy Papleux and Richard Tronson – the former a painter, the latter a photographer – are resolutely committed to a singular approach to the individual. In his paintings, Jean-Rémy Papleux mixes time images and movement images, thereby imbuing his portraits with a density – which, if executed through the medium of cinema, could be characterized as dramatic. Richard Tronson’s work pushes the envelope of coherence with images that subvert our traditional way of reading constructed space. Tronson’s interiors are disturbing and disquieting – feelings aroused as much by suspended personages, turned in on themselves and alienated from society, as by the sensory lability induced by an image composed of numerous counterfeits.

 

The large scale felt “paintings” by Florent Mattei invite us to reread the history of art through the lens of irony. Mattéi loves painting the way we love the gorgeous images that grace boxes of inexpensive Christmas chocolates. Her J’aime la peinture (I love painting) brings historical paintings to life in a mode poised between imagery and idolatry.

 

Luc Léotoing and Cédric Teisseire use frontality as a visual and conceptual tool for the creation of a new type of abstract painting. Luc Léotoing’s paintings reactivate spaces which are a priori not destined for him. His painting Hall over creates a symbiosis with the exhibition space, endowing painting with a new geography.

Cédric Teisseire’s paintings concern themselves with issues that are an outgrowth of the history of abstract art. The thick coating of lacquer on his waxed paintings create frontal and reflective, albeit depthless surfaces. His work extends the question of frontality beyond the painting, and in so doing addresses the issue of painting and its excesses.

 

Meeting these two fronts head on in the exhibition space, the work of Marc Chevalier calls into question the composition of painting as well as the constitution of a geopolitical realm. From receding lines marked out by adhesives to frontal lines marked out by rows of tanks in combat, the space of these paintings, which are made entirely of adhesive tape, bring us back to the problem of the aesthetic or political dissolution of a geopolitical realm.

 

This frontal painting bears testimony to the cross-contamination of the pictorial and political realms. The Sur le Front show proposes that the living essence of painting be localized by inscribing its history in its geography. Painting is the realm of thought.

 

 

Cécile Marie, exhibition curator