Book 19


Book 317

Contemporary French Art 1

by Michael Bishop

Published 1 January 2008
Ben Vautier, Niki De Saint Phalle, Francois Morellet, Louise Bourgeois, Alexandre Hollan, Claude Viallat, Sophie Calle, Bernard Pages, Jean-Pierre Pincemin, Annette Messager, Gerard Titus-Carmel: eleven major French artists of the last forty years or so, examined in the light of their uniqueness and their rootedness, the specificities of their differing and at times overlapping plastic practices and the swirling and often highly hybridised conceptions entertained in regard to such practices. Thus does analysis range from discussion of the feisty, Fluxus-inspired, free-spirited funkiness of Ben Vautier's work to the various modes of transcendence of trauma and haunting fear generated by the exceptional gestures of Niki de Saint Phalle and Louise Bourgeois, to the alyrical formalism yet imbued with irony and ludicity of Francois Morellet, through to the serene intensities of Alexandre Hollan's vies silencieuses, the infinite a-signatures of Claude Viallat's adventure in the sheer joy of a poiein of self-reflexive coloration, the powerfully elegant and muscular disarticulations of Bernard Pages' sculpture, the great sweep through art's history implied by Jean-Pierre Pincemin's chameleon-like gestures, the vast swirling programme of socio-psychological analysis the arts of Annette Messager and Sophie Calle offer in their radically distinctive manners, the obsessively serialised oeuvre of Gerard Titus-Carmel allowing a burrowing deep into the opaque logic of a real though dubious 'presence to the world'.

Book 362

Contemporary French Art 2

by Michael Bishop

Published 1 January 2011
Gerard Garouste, Colette Deble, Georges Rousse, Genevieve Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joel Kermarrec, Daniele Perronne, Daniel Dezeuze, Philippe Favier, Daniel Nadaud: after the eleven essays of Contemporary French Art 1, devoted to major artists from Ben Vautier and Niki de Saint Phalle to Annette Messager and Gerard Titus-Carmel, the present volume pursues its interrogations of the what, the how and the why of contemporary plastic production of some of France's finest practitioners. If, as ever, such production can reveal elements of an interweaving of individualized preoccupations and modes, endless specificities demarcate and affirm originalities that pure theory and its leveling anonymity may obscure. Thus is it that Gerard Garouste is alone in that obsession with 'indianness' and 'classicalness'; that Colette Deble's gesture is drawn implacably to the unseenness of female representation; that Georges Rousse plunges photography into the realm of matter's poetic sacredness; that Genevieve Asse traverses a pure seemingness of abstraction to attain to an intimacy of silence; that Martial Raysse's 'hygiene of vision' may endlessly renew and hybridize itself. Christian Jaccard, too, will explore with uniqueness an art of materiality at the frontier of metaphysics; Joel Kermarrec will offer us the inimitable exquisite traces of surging desire and deception; Daniele Perronne's boxes and stringings, her paintings and her sheetings will unfold a psychic infinity at the heart of form. And, if Daniel Dezeuze seeks namelessness and pure structuration, the latter yet surge forth via works that relentlessly identify a gesture so distant, we may feel, from the at once sobering and ceremonial microproliferations of a Philippe Favier or the tense but genial articulations of Daniel Nadaud's sculptural imagination.

Contemporary French Art

by Michael Bishop

Published 10 June 2011
G rard Garouste, Colette Debl , Georges Rousse, Genevi ve Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Jo l Kermarrec, Dani le Perronne, Daniel Dezeuze, Philippe Favier, Daniel Nadaud: after the eleven essays of Contemporary French Art 1, devoted to major artists from Ben Vautier and Niki de Saint Phalle to Annette Messager and G rard Titus-Carmel, the present volume pursues its interrogations of the what, the how and the why of contemporary plastic production of some of France's finest practitioners. If, as ever, such production can reveal elements of an interweaving of individualized preoccupations and modes, endless specificities demarcate and affirm originalities that pure theory and its leveling anonymity may obscure. Thus is it that G rard Garouste is alone in that obsession with 'indianness' and 'classicalness'; that Colette Debl 's gesture is drawn implacably to the unseenness of female representation; that Georges Rousse plunges photography into the realm of matter's poetic sacredness; that Genevi ve Asse traverses a pure seemingness of abstraction to attain to an intimacy of silence; that Martial Raysse's 'hygiene of vision' may endlessly renew and hybridize itself. Christian Jaccard, too, will explore with uniqueness an art of materiality at the frontier of metaphysics; Jo l Kermarrec will offer us the inimitable exquisite traces of surging desire and deception; Dani le Perronne's boxes and stringings, her paintings and her sheetings will unfold a psychic infinity at the heart of form. And, if Daniel Dezeuze seeks namelessness and pure structuration, the latter yet surge forth via works that relentlessly identify a gesture so distant, we may feel, from the at once sobering and ceremonial microproliferations of a Philippe Favier or the tense but genial articulations of Daniel Nadaud's sculptural imagination.