Contemporary art in Paris seems without a single centre. A diversity of groups exist alongside one another, in various niches, with no single institution, commercial gallery or area of the city able to be a hub where they can all interact. This system has yet to collapse, despite a harsh socio-economic environment that has forced many curators and artists to leave, usually for Brussels or Berlin, in search of art centres where proper working spaces and sustainable independent livings are more easily procured.
In recent years, some fixtures of the Paris art scene have left or been replaced: Hans Ulrich Obrist went to the Serpentine Gallery in London; Fabrice Hergott took over from Suzanne Pagé as director of the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris; Jennifer Flay became director of FIAC, France’s major contemporary art fair; Xavier Franceschi is now director of Le Plateau, a contemporary art institution in north Paris; and a hub of galleries opened in Belleville. The new players have brought clarity and purpose to their institutions, turning them into successful enterprises. This happily coincided with the introduction of a new aesthetic vocabulary into French art by emerging artists such as Oscar Tuazon, Laurent Grasso, Aurélien Froment, the artist collective Claire Fontaine, Adel Abdessemed, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Ulla von Brandenburg and Mircea Cantor.
Now, in 2013, another generation is emerging. It needs a new place to meet and work. Could it be Silencio, a club opened by David Lynch? For some occasions, perhaps. But there’s also Castillo/Corrales, which houses a gallery, a library and a publisher; Shanaynay, where there’s an interesting dynamic between the different cultural backgrounds of its two curators, one French, the other Californian; and a number of galleries—Marcelle Alix, Joseph Tang and Antoine Levi, among others—whose recent openings have succeeded in creating a kind of synergy. The most exciting project is the rebranding of the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris. Under the guidance of Nicolas Bourriaud, it is mutating from a superannuated institution into a modern institute of learning, with a refreshing and challenging program of exhibitions. Further signs of change in the ecology of Parisian art institutions include the upcoming appointment of a new director at the Centre Pompidou, lately much in need of a new vision; the launch of the contemporary art program Monnaie de Paris, a new artistic centre led by Chiara Parisi; and the forthcoming opening of two major private art foundations, Lafayette and Vuitton.
For this survey, I was allowed to select only six artists—a very difficult task given the breadth of talent in contemporary French art. Therefore, before launching into a description of their work, I would like to recommend that readers also seek out the work of Camille Henrot, Mohamed Bourouissa, Charlotte Moth, David Douard, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Renaud Jerez, Meris Angioletti, Juliette Bonneviot and Jonathan Binet. To name a few.
Neil Beloufa (born 1985, France)
How do we inhabit an image? How can we articulate an alternative knowledge? Is it possible to build counter-memories from displaced, condensed or fictional images and narratives? These are some of the questions Neil Beloufa raises in his diverse body of work: sculptures, assemblages, videos and installations that explore the construction of narrative systems and their transposition into systems of representation through the production and dissemination of images. As a result of his manipulation and treatment of narrative, most of Beloufa’s videos and installations remain unanswered enigmas whose meanings must be invented through reading and construction, blurring the boundaries between author, actor, protagonist and observer. Beloufa himself has dubbed his practice “ethnological sci-fi documentary.” His work demonstrates an abiding interest in dichotomies—reality and fiction, cause and effect, presence and absence—deconstructing received notions of truth and fantasy, flipping them around to pose fantasy as truth. His video Untitled (Algier Modernist House) (2010), for instance, charts the story of an Algerian family whose house was forcibly occupied by terrorists. As the family attempts to imagine how the terrorists might have behaved in their home, their fantasies become the basis for a documentary. Beloufa’s latest works and installations have pushed this practice a step forward by merging facts, fictions and narratives. Together with other artists of his generation presented at this year’s Venice Biennale, Beloufa is forging a new subjecthood within “virtual reality.”
Nicolas Deshayes (born 1983, France)
Nicolas Deshayes produces sculpture paintings and painting sculptures; that is to say, art that tends to escape classification by merging different, often diametrically opposed techniques and influences. In this sense, his works are unified zones of conflict; they create the sort of electric impulse inherent to hybrids. Visually striking as these voluptuous and dazzling works may be, they should not be considered autonomous objects: they belong in systems, series and groups that obey precise rules of installation. In this way, Deshayes thwarts immediate, possibly reductive interpretations. What might at first appear to be an autonomous abstract work refers, in fact, to a latrine. Instead of grand painterly abstract gestures, better to think of Andy Warhol’s piss paintings and become fascinated by the transformation of industrial materials and processes into bodily liquids and formlessness. That’s how Deshayes battles idealism and the fetishizing of autonomous works and the matter of which they are composed. Deshayes’s works can refer, at once and without contradiction, to Donald Judd and Alina Szapocznikow, Jo Baer and Alberto Burri, Larry Bell and Louise Bourgeois, as there are no longer any valid taxonomies operating between high and low, horizontality and verticality—hence Deshayes’s use of fluid and liquid as metaphors for his practice. His enterprise participates in what Rosalind Krauss describes, in Formless: A User’s Guide (1997), as a declassing of visual art: “The other word to which Bataille turned to evoke this process of ‘deviance’ was informe, a de-classing in every sense of the term: in the separation between space and time…in the systems of spatial mapping…in the qualifications of matter…in the structural order of systems.” Not a Pop illustration of the spectacular society of image and information, but a deeper, structural approach: Deshayes is attempting to reveal the global contamination of the aesthetic categories that once formed a grid supporting our world, and to show their deliquescence.
Latifa Echakhch (born 1974, Morocco)
Latifa Echakhch was born in Morocco, was raised and educated in France, and now lives in Switzerland. At the time of her solo exhibition at Tate Modern in 2008, she was still unrepresented; afterward, her profile rose, and she is now associated with some of the most established European galleries. Her art resonates best in large installations and solo exhibitions; it becomes more difficult to understand when fragmented or shown in group shows, as it resists the “autonomy” of objecthood. Echakhch is more comfortable when proposing an aesthetic system, which sometimes involves a violent element of performativity: objects being broken or thrown against a wall. Her sculptures and installations explore visual and architectural codes of identity and the clichés attached to them. Referencing Islamic geometric patterns, Minimalism, Colour Field painting, radical politics and the bureaucracy of residency visas, she examines how even the most banal objects can be infused with cultural assumptions. A number of works incorporate materials such as tea glasses, carpets and couscous, which provide her with a way of reflecting on her Moroccan heritage, although, as she points out, these things were never part of her everyday life in Paris.
Cyprien Gaillard (born 1980, France)
“I’m interested in things failing, in the beauty of failure.” With videos, films, photographs and installations, Cyprien Gaillard, who lives and works in Berlin, has built an extensive catalogue of contemporary ruins. His work has been analyzed by himself, and others, through the prism of Romanticism and Land art, 18th-century theories of the sublime, and Robert Smithson’s essay on entropy and decay. But the real focus of attention in Gaillard’s work may not be architecture per se (although postwar tower blocks, brutalist design and housing estates constantly appear as imagery), but a more general approach to particular sites and the emergence of the sublime through modalities of entropy, decay, destruction, collage and so on. In his landmark treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke defines the sublime as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger…whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror.” The sublime, for Burke, provokes terror in an audience, but there is an inherent “pleasure” in this terror. The sublime is a mixed feeling, a pause in reason’s mastery of the unconscious, during which the unknown, the impossible and the obscure may enter the human mind and heart. When Gaillard archives the destruction of concrete housing estates, when he collages an element of postwar social politics onto a 17th-century engraving, when he covers part of an 18th- or 19th-century landscape with gestural strokes of white paint, when he builds a pyramid of imported Turkish beer in a German art centre and turns this minimal monument into a disastrous anti-form installation, he is documenting a contemporary sublime: the force of the mass and the possibility of chaos.
Benoît Maire (born 1978, France)
Benoît Maire is the most “French” of the French artists selected for this survey: born in France, educated in France and resident of France. Before turning to visual art, Maire studied philosophy; this, along with his interest in Conceptual art, is the reason, perhaps, he has been pigeonholed as a Post-Conceptual artist. Yet, even though he is in permanent conversation, when not in actual collaboration, with artists such as Falke Pisano, Ryan Gander, Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick, his work is better described in more traditional terms. Not only is his use of sculpture, film and photography intensely formal, but his latest works, in particular, reveal him to have inherited as much from Surrealism, Giorgio Morandi and Arte Povera as from Stephane Mallarmé, Conceptual art and Jacques Derrida. His collages and assemblages force structures, references and materials into paradoxical but productive relationships. The original sources, frequently borrowed from art history, are not crucial; what matters is the collision of cognitive structures and the discovery of a wild and sensual rapport with theory and culture. Maire presents his audience with a discourse on theory as shape, and a surprising relationship to freedom (of interpretation, at the very least) and thought as co-production. Most recently, he has risen to the challenge of producing large exhibitions and installations, demonstrating a sense of scale and an understanding of space that will lead, one hopes, to more exhibitions abroad.
Laure Prouvost (born 1978, France)
One of the most sought-after artists currently working in London, and a nominee for this year’s Turner Prize, Laure Prouvost is, surprisingly, little known in her native country. Her compact, raw-edged videos are violently rhythmic pieces whose narratives seem to parody the genres from which they originate. In her work, Prouvost often mentions a fictional character, a grandfather who could very well be Dieter Roth or John Latham (whose assistant she was)—in either case, an artist whose raw, flawed, artless aesthetic she has inherited and now uses to create her own rich and imaginative system. First known for video installations and performances that explored the disconnection between words and images—the slippery nature of translations, not only between languages but also between media—she has started to produce more immersive installations that include painting and sculpture. It is the Beckettian absurdity or existential nonsense of these works, more than any particular strategy of parody or satire, that distinguishes them from, say, Ryan Trecartin’s pop-kitsch installations. Samuel Beckett could be another avatar of Prouvost’s grandfather; his influence is in the extraordinary theatricality of the installations, the precise understanding of the symbolism of an object or a picture, and, above all, the humour that gives form to the base materialism inherent to the human condition.
Vincent Honoré is an independent curator based in Paris and curator and head of the collection at the David Roberts Art Foundation in London. This is an article from the Fall 2013 issue of Canadian Art that relates to our upcoming Paris-Toronto symposium. To read more from this issue, please visit its table of contents.
