The contemporary gallery of the modern art museum innovates by presenting the ‘L.G.R’ collection. Neither a school nor an artist is offered to the curious gaze of the public, but rather the collections of three art history enthusiasts. Laurence Climbeau, Roland and Gaétane Botrel have gathered the fruits of their passions, their collections, and present about thirty works by various artists from the second half of the 20th century. The guiding thread of these paintings, drawings, sculptures, and portraits follows the concept of narrative figuration.
Artists like Valerio Adami, Edouardo Arroyo, Errô, Jacques Monory, Bernard Rancillac, and Hervé Télémaque represent this part of the exhibition. The second chapter invites us to discover independent artists who do not belong to any movement: Pierre Buraglio, Erik Dietman, Paul Rebeyrolle, and Yan Pei-Ming.
Between these two aspects of the exhibition, the visitor is confronted with mythology, questioning, existence, and the essence of becoming. It is therefore a whole journey through human history, mythology where Jupiter devours his children, and art that this exhibition offers us.
We should not look at these works with our material eye; the mere primary vision would puzzle us, but we must first understand and analyze them.
To conclude these works, we must place ourselves back in the context of the sixties with the first echoes of the rejection of consumer society. May 1968 is not far off. The marriage of the carp and the rabbit, where the carp seems to triumph, is a fine example of the rejection of societal conventions where consumption is key.
At the start of the 21st century, these artists’ cries of alarm, warnings given forty years ago, find their full truth today in the face of the worrying deviations of our society. These artists may have been right, and from pop art to narrative figuration, we neglected this lifeline, the answers to our current questioning about the future of our decaying society, a victim of excessive consumption.
Erik Dietman offers us the conclusion with the evening cup, a skull symbolized on a coffee cup. The evening, the night, death, and the end of the journey.
This exhibition is open from Tuesday to Sunday at the contemporary gallery of MAMAC, Place Yves Klein, until January 5, 2014.
Thierry Jan
