France: Instant Présent

Jean-Charles de Castelbajac (2016)

In literature, modernity took great strides forward with the epic humorous work of Rabelais (Gargantua et Pantagruel) and the intimate and philosophical work of Montaigne; with the plays of Molière, Corneille and Racine; with the great historical novel of Hugo and Stendhal, Balzac’s Comédie humaine and the splendid novels of Flaubert, capable of identifying with the characters and people that inspired them. And then, in the early 21th century, Proust’s monumental cycle of novels À la recherche du temps perdu, which marks the final dissolution of the objective reality of space and time in favour of the affirmation of memory, the subconscious and disturbing questions about our identity and consistency.

Elias Crespin - Cubic inception (2016)

The history of philosophy, moreover, cannot afford to ignore French authors such as René Descartes, whose methodic doubt is a foundation of modern philosophical speculation. Or the rationalism of the Enlightenment, with figures such as Rousseau and Montesquieu, whose political considerations underpin the constitutions of modern liberal and democratic States. Or again, the Enciclopédie devised and directed by Diderot and D’Alembert, which marks the beginning of a secular and egalitarian method of organizing knowledge.

Françoise Spiess - Reinventing light (2016)

Boasting such a prestigious cultural tradition, the French have always defended with great zeal their genius loci, in particular, their language. The French are among the most linguistically conservative societies, and their resistance to the pervasiveness of English is legendary, even down to their shop signs. Moreover France also has a prestigious scholastic tradition, with the Sorbonne in Paris, in particular, one of the oldest universities on the old continent.

Mounier Fatmi (2016)

When Édouard Manet’s Olympia was exhibited for the first time – in room M of the Paris Salon, in May 1865 – figurative art made a huge leap forward towards the avant-garde and the future. Manet “caused all Paris to run to see this curious woman, with her magnificent bouquet, her negress and her black cat,” wrote the critic Théophile Thoré. Olympia – naked, a velvet ribbon around her neck, a gold wrist cuff and oriental slippers – appeared lewd, immoral, scandalous in the way she gazed with impunity on her viewers. Provocative and dazzling in the way she looked out at what lay beyond the picture.

Mickaël Doucet - The wind is picking up (2016)

One hundred years later, in a somewhat similar fashion, the director François Truffaut writes one of the most intense pages of modern cinema with one of the most beautiful close-up shots in the history of film: the final moments of The 400 Blows (1961), when the desperate gaze of the adolescent Jean-Pierre Léaud, looking directly into the camera, communicates the abandonment of pretence, meeting the viewer’s eyes to invoke a joint responsibility for the human condition.

Rudy Ricciotti - Untitled (2016)

And it is the whole of France, moreover, that contributes to this culture that strengthens us, to art, to the layers of memory, the dignity and the role of moral leadership to which they are entitled. While Paris is the symbol of French grandeur in the broadest sense, with its monuments, museums that are among the most visited in the world, the frenetic and creative rhythm of the streets that have attracted artists from all over the globe, the country as a whole is home to over thirty UNESCO World Heritage Sites. These range from prehistoric sites such as the notable Lascaux cave paintings caves, to the Roman vestiges of Arles and Orange, from the remarkable system of navigable waterways that is the Canal du Midi, to the fortifications of Carcassonne and Vauban, from the landscape embroidered with vineyards of Burgundy to the place of origin of champagne, both included in the UNESCO list in 2015.

Jean-Paul Donadini - Halted white brush (2016)

Moreover we only need to take a stroll through the streets of a small midi city, Aix-en-Provence, to see first hand how everything, boulevards, fountains, monuments, landscapes, still reference Paul Cézanne and his work, including Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Cézanne painted obsessively, (44 oils and 43 watercolours), making it one of the symbols of modern art: “For a long time, I remained helpless, unable to paint the Sainte-Victoire, simply because I pictured it having a concave shadow. Whereas look for yourselves, it clearly has a concave shadow that elopes from its centre. Rather than shrinking, it evaporates, it fluidises. It contributes its blue tones to the colours of the breeze.”

Isa Barbier - Untitled (2016)

French modernity at times also becomes a critic of modernity. As in the case of the French Pavilion at the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice, dedicated to the theme Modernity: promise or menace?, in response to the theme Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014, assigned to the national pavilions. There, the curator Jean-Louis Cohen questioned the false illusions of a modernity made exclusively of growth, affluence and approval, by returning us to a more complex and not always linear reality. Presenting, in particular, under the title Jaques Tati et la Villa Arpel : objet de désir ou machine ridicule?, the model of the house of the hero in the film Mon Oncle, designed by the painter Jacques Lagrange as an ironic portrait of a hyper- technological modernity. And creating a short circuit between the desire for a futuristic wellbeing and a mechanical and technological oppression that enslaves.

Caroline Sury - Frog girl (2016)

“I would be curious to know – said the French writer Patrick Modiano in his acceptance speech of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm – how the next generations, born with the internet, mobile phones, emails and tweets, will express through literature this world in which everyone is permanently connected and where social networks are eating into that part of intimacy and secrecy that was still our own domain until quite recently – the secrecy that gave depth to individuals and could become a major theme in a novel.”

Didier Faustino - Less and no More (2016)

“In the noble name of cultural democratization – he controversially wrote in the pages of Le Monde in 2010 – the State, not content with monitoring the national heritage, for which it is responsible, already considered itself an avant-garde patron. And it felt the need to subsidize and host rock, rap, tags and more, borrowed from American mass culture, avant-garde by definition.” Adding that “if money has neither smell nor homeland, poetry, the arts and memories do. Today it is more necessary than ever to remember this fact. It is no longer, as before, a question of deepening the spontaneous sense of national identity through poetry, the arts and memory, but of letting it be born and grow among the newcomers in the national community.” And in France today, wounded by Islamic terrorism, poised between fear and the populism of ignorance, the role of art appears all the more vivid and necessary.

Charlotte L’Harmeroult - Three kisses for a cut (2016)

“A movement of the imaginary, a choral work free of cacophony, France: Instant Present – writes the curator Isabelle Valembras Dahirel in her introduction to this catalogue – is a tile in the global mosaic of Imago Mundi.” In these pages, the artistic expression of contemporary France responds with 210 11x12 cm works, full of inspiration, talent, colour, transfiguration, anxieties, energies, cries (and collective civic participation), to this complex chapter for the Republic and, in general terms, to the aggressions and intricate challenges of our times.