PARIS.- The exhibition "Future, Former, Fugitive", devoted to “a (in others words ‘certain’) French scene” is based on an open conception of territorial placement – bringing together artists born in France and abroad, living in France or elsewhere, linked provisionally or lastingly to this country – escaping from the effects of a tabula rasa which would dictate that one generation eclipses another. On the contrary, it unites “contemporaries” who today share this evolving space with its porous frontiers. Meanwhile, it seeks to sketch out the routes of transmission through which this mood of the times is conveyed and which suround for the forty-four artists or groups that have here been united. They are artists born between the 1930s and the 1990s, but who all live and work in and with their era.

Contemporary is a “transitive word and thus relational”, Lionel Ruffel reminds us in Brouhaha. Les mondes du contemporain (Brouhaha: Worlds of the Contemporary)1. We are contemporary with something or with someone and it is this interdependency or bond that allows us to establish bridges from one artist to another in the exhibition. It is again this permeability to the present and a form of permanence in time which we seemed to notice in the artists in the exhibition and which allowed us to draw up this unexhaustive, and unrepresentative, but quite simply sensitive, snap of a French scene. Or, rather, of “another” French scene. The one that is being created more discreetly, but no less powerfully, in studios, art schools, shared spaces, on the margins or distant from the market.

The invited artists thus share forms of resistance to assignations and other fashion effects which deeply tinge an era. But these artists do not isolate themselves from today’s world. On the contrary, it might be said that by refusing immediacy, they allow the density of time to infiltrate their works. “The ones that call themselves contemporary are only those who do not allow themselves to be blinded by the lights of the century, and so manage to get a glimpse of the shadows in those lights, of their intimate obscurity”2 as Giorgio Agamben wrote a few years ago, while also bringing up the highly effective notion of “unactuality” which could fit with the artists who are in action here.

This exhibition is also an opportunity to bring to mind that there is not just one French scene, but rather a number of communities, engagements and singularities. During the months of preparation of the exhibition, we were surprised by the increasingly outstanding posture of some of the individualities on the vast and complex surface of the French landscape. With a still-lively curiosity for a return to the collective which can been felt today among a certain number of young artists, who are trying out a new way of living together, in shared spaces and forms of mutualisation as an answer to an economic need, we have little by little been moved to a need to reaffirm more singular trajectories. They are singular yet not necessarily solitary, given that many of the artists in this exhibition keep up forms of companionship in the long term with peers of every generation.

These tales of genealogy underpin the exhibition. Little talked about or exhibited, they are still essential to all the artistic scenes who owe their lives to the multiplicity of viewpoints when it comes to affinities and a form of continuity. Among the forty-four artists or collectives who have been brought together many met in art schools, which are ultimate places for intergenerational transmission. Alongside these sites for fertile encounters, a large number of more informal spaces, on the margins of institutions, have been decisive for the artists in the exhibition. "Future, Former, Fugitive" is also particular in the sense that it brings together a large number of artists with atypical trajectories, which are non-linear or up-and-down, and who sometimes root themselves or thrive far from the artworld. As a sensitive and dynamic mapping of another French scene, this exhibition reaffirms the role of certain broker of ideas or more secret and fleeting figures in every sense, but above all of artists who have set their work in a sort of duration, whether they be at the start of their careers or at the head of a deep body of work.

Finally, something should be said about the title which we have taken from the eponymous work by Olivier Cadiot. As an “experimental” writer, poet, playwright, and himself at the crossroads between various artistic fields, he has placed experience, creation and a decisive take on time at the heart of his subtly unclassifiable writing. "Future, Former, Fugitive" brought into his novels a figure who would become recurrent: Robinson. A “Robinson” far from the heroic character depicted by Daniel Defoe, simply “just beside, on the edge, maybe just below” as Eric Mangion writes in the Palais magazine that accompanies this exhibition. Fleeing the grip of time, “fugitive” seems to us to be a good description for these forty-four witnesses of an ungraspable present.

--Franck Balland, Daria de Beauvais, Adélaïde Blanc, Claire Moulène – curators of the exhibition. Marilou Thiébault – curatorial assistant.

LAYOUT OF THE EXHIBITION
“Future, Former, Fugitive” begins with a tender yet caustic portrait of what is clearly missing from such an expression: the present. The artists presented in the first section have turned it into a research subject. Pierre Joseph opens the exhibition with a harvesting of blackberries, evoking our frugal future at a time of ecological catastrophe. He preceeds artist gatherers such as Anne Le Troter or Fabienne Audéoud who practice collection and recycling focused on a circuit of objects and affects which become ever more profuse, but also more precarious. On this layer of reality, other artists such as Alain Séchas, Grégoire Beil, Marine Peixoto or Nicolas Tubéry practise drastic and precise free cuttings: each in their own way, removing or extending fragments of existence symptomatic of an era.

But this priority given to the present does not eclipse the eternal question of the future of beings and things. Mocking religious figures painted by Vidya Gastaldon rub shoulders with the raw installations of Maurice Blaussyld and Aude Pariset. The former has incarcerated an imposing mound below the Grande Verrière, while the latter feeds the mattresses of three children’s beds worms. There is thus a question of waste, a return to primitive forms which, with Laura Lamiel and Adrien Vescovi, come over as the founding principles of works obtained from elementary forces.

There are many fertile partitions and self-wrapped forms that punctuate the exhibition. Several carefully composed set-ups enter into a resonance, thanks to their ability to become eclipsed partially from our eyes, such as Renaud Jerez’s window display, which dissolves into space via its smooth, reflecting sides. Jean-Alain Corre and Anne Bourse respectively invest a prison cell and a bedroom as interior spaces to be discovered, from which seems to hatch out a figure of the double, the alter ego on the avatar. But an enclosed space also entails cohabitation, as in the tent put up by Martin Belou, which reveals links of interdependence in an imaginary landscape.

Other artists in the exhibition, stimulated by the great narratives of the past, while finding a new meaning in the current times, take their inspiration from immemorial systems of references. Nils Alix-Tabeling for example finds in medieval folklore a cosmogony celebrating margins and a relationship with a fluid body, while Jean Claus draws on Greek mythology – the theatre of all passions – for the ornamentation of his domestic altars. Carlotta Bailly-Borg then joins them in the production of disturbing, androgynous figures, in constant metamorphosis, borrowing from Hindu miniatures as much as from erotic Japanese prints

After a change of scale suggested by the domestic hangings of Corentin Grossmann and Antoine Marquis, the exhibition shifts towards a more intimate dimension. These artists go over their private domains using personal fictions, reflections about gender and the fluidity of identities as well as styles. Marc Camille Chaimowicz is one of the masters in this respect, gliding between the decorative and fine arts, between a fading aesthetic and its queer, subversive counterpart, into a fertile practice. There is the same ambiguity in the falsely amateur images of Julien Carreyn or the suggestive sculptures of JeanCharles de Quillacq. Nathalie Du Pasquier, who takes up a central place, has shifted her studio and reconfigured it into huts that bring together her production with objects and works from her daily life.

A few irreducible artists find in the studio space a site to cut themselves off. As specialist dodgers, they range to and fro between a sensitive reality and their own references. They sample here and assemble there, faithful to a credo of distortion, as with Antoine Château or Anna Solal, who work on the slow revelation of possible motifs. Kengné Téguia deals with the zone that separates the world of the deaf from hearing people, while Hendrik Hegray and Jonas Delaborde have produced together the imagery of their own underworld.

The final part of the exhibition rethinks the possible contribution of cultural, intellectual and political history. A déjà-vu impression runs through it, in particular in the display of Jean-Luc Blanc’s haunted portraits. Meanwhile, for Antoine Renard and Lili Reynaud-Dewar, appropriations or critical citations seem to be a way to update the meaning of these narratives, in a collective and inclusive rationale.