FRAC Champagne-Ardenne

With Franz Ackermann, Corentin Canesson, Melissa Dubbin & Aaron S. Davidson, Jennifer Douzenel, Mar García Albert, Hippolyte Hentgen,
Robert Malaval, Nicolas Momein, François Petit, Laure Prouvost, Clément Rodzielski, Lilli Thiessen, Julia Wachtel, Lois Weinberger.

Curator : Marie Griffay

The FRAC Champagne-Ardenne collection includes a group of remarkable paintings that shed light on high-quality individual practices without going back over the whole history of the medium. “Été pourri peinture fraîche” (Rotten Summer, Wet Paint) is the title of a series of drawings by Robert Malaval (from the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne Collection), whose work endlessly mixed rock, pop esthetic, the end of the world, the festive and the tragic, thus playing a significant part in opening up art practices generally. Painting, sculpture, performance, and music were entwined in Malaval’s art; his output has inspired many other artists since. The show is a discreet homage to this all-in outré commitment, bringing together artists whose own approaches throw off the burden of a history of painting that goes back millennia and embrace the freedom to reinvent and redirect the medium and imagine new rules.

Julia Wachtel, Hippolyte Hentgen, Lilli Thiessen, and Mar García Albert stand back from the classic subjects and paint images; Laure Prouvost, Clément Rodzielski, and Nicolas Momein prefer not to choose between painting and sculpture but rather mix the two genres; Franz Ackermann and François Petit borrow from other sources and create flamboyant paintings; Lois Weinberger has given up designing the composition of his work and entrusts the process to insects in his stead; Corentin Canesson follows a protocol in producing figurative paintings measuring one square meter; Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson imagine the posthuman future of painting, producing the anthropometry of a robot; and finally Jennifer Douzenel, making films the way others paint, closes out the exhibition with a pictorial video.  

Wet paint, freed painting.