Mots Bleus Les Exhibitionnistes
01 | 07 | 17
Coming after ‘Doux Baisers’ in December 2016, ‘Mots Bleus’ is the second exhibition created by the Exhibitionist Research and Creation Workshop of the ESAAA (Ecole Supérieure d’Art de l’Agglomération d’Annecy) with works from the IAC collection (l’Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes). It was created as a partnership between the ESAAA, the Flaine Art Centre and the IAC.
“It was already there last winter. I saw it on a postcard in Flaine and it had struck me then. It had seemed so far away, printed on a thin piece of card that almost fitted in my pocket. So now I’m back, determined to become immersed in the postcard image and to visit the sculpture on its home ground. The works of art here seem to have created their own world; I wander through an imaginary land, or rather a postcard of it. I’m thinking that these works must not know much about the outside world for them to be parodying it in this way.
“The works seem to have created their own world; the sun doesn’t set here, everything seems fixed in an eternal summer. The yellow floor is sand, the blue walls the sky. I’m walking in a synthetic world, following the walkway leading me to the end of this mock scene. I let myself be carried along by this troubling fiction, even though I don’t really believe it.
“Have I reached a deserted film studio, or am I the hero of a video game? I wander in the middle of this schematic beach, structured by elements of a fantastical and incomplete design. I’m in an imaginary land, or maybe a postcard of it. I don’t know if I’m in a virtual setting or its imitation; in a contemporary art exhibition, or a simulation of one. Fiction has taken over from reality and I’m starting to wonder if these work of art are authentic and if the mountains outside are real.
“I’m thinking that these works must not know much about the outside world for them to be parodying it in this way. They have left extra-terrestrial objects at their holiday destination (François Curlet, ‘Trois Boules’, 2007). This seems to confirm a somewhat futuristic way of life, of which we have lost the customs and the function (Nathalie du Pasquier, ‘Coupe à Fruits Courtoise Manière’, 1983). Just as in a seaside resort, we come across canvases painted by a landscape artist, but here the fictional artist seems condemned to forever repeat a pixelised abstraction (Ernest T, Boîte no 2, 1988). The atmosphere is one of nostalgia, or the memory of a song that gives the blues to this cloudless sky in which flashes of lightening appear (Jean Marie Krauth, Eclair(s), 1979).”
Romane Clavel, Nicolas Quiriconi, Marie Lou Haber, Leila Ory, Anouk Lebreton, Alice Martin, Hilary Galbreaith, Nathan Viboud and Marie Mercklé, ESAAA students of the Exhibitionist Research and Creation Workshop and curators of the exhibition, would like to thank:
- The Flaine Art Centre and its director, Gilbert Coquard,
- The IAC and its team of Chantal Poncet and Romain Goumy
- The ESAAA and its director, Stéphane Sauzedde
- Teachers Camille Le Houezec, Jocelyn Villemont and Julie Portier