Bodies, faces, sections of architecture, lines and signs… painted or sketched, sometimes erased or crossed out, the elements composing the canvases of Doria Jeridi (just graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris) collide on the void of the canvas with an expressive force and a graphic power evoking the distortions and misalignments of Francis Bacon.
« Bacon said he used frames to concentrate intensity. […] I think art is an intensification of reality. […] What matters is the overall balance of the painting " explains the artist, winner of the 2022 Emerige Revelations grant, who, playing on oppositions and contradictions (between the muted and silent tones of charcoal and the vibrancy of oil sticks, the figurative and the abstract…), does not hesitate to replace a head with a mauve circle…
This is one of the strong faces of the new figuration honored in four successive parts at the Orangerie of the Caillebotte property, in Yerres (in Essonne), alongside the great tutelary figures of figurative painting of the second half of the 20th century exhibited concurrently in the house of the impressionist painter.
For once, this is not the usual approach. It is thanks to the resurgence of figurative art among younger generations that tribute is being paid to figurative painters neglected by institutions over the past sixty years. Among the older generation, we can cite Gérard Schlosser (who died in 2022) and his tight framing, making us voyeurs confronted with scenes of life reminiscent of photo novels or freeze-frames; Mouna Rebeiz and her flayed nude tattooed with the spray-painted inscription: I am a fucking painter (2008); Youcef Korichi with an impressive portrait emerging from a monumental and virtuoso blue drape (2015); and the interplay of intertwined spatial structures in pop colors by Leonardo Cremonini (circa 1967). the falsely hyperrealistic cinematic portraits of François Bard (2021-2022), the bodies in perdition of Jean Rustin (1998-2002) or even the piles of garbage and suburban pavilions (circa 1955) of astonishing modernity by Jürg Kreienbühl.
Among the younger artists, Nicolas Sage presents us with portraits and architectural landscapes featuring almost expressionistic, highly theatrical plays of light, while Manon Pellan uses graphite to explore the illusion of line and white space between presence and absence. Bilal Hamdad, for his part, depicts the solitude of individuals in urban landscapes (metro stations, café terraces, etc.), provoking a feeling of strangeness… a feeling even more pronounced when viewing Axel Roy's canvases painted with oil, acrylic, and marble dust, and for good reason: to focus on "interactions between people," the artist has chosen to eliminate all surrounding elements (vegetation, architecture, street furniture, etc.).
The boundary between the real and the imaginary, the figurative and the non-figurative, thus appears to us to be definitively obsolete, if indeed it ever existed…
"FIGURATIONS. ANOTHER ART OF TODAY"
MAISON CAILLEBOTTE – 8, RUE DE CONCY, YERRES
UNTIL OCTOBER 22, 2023
MAISONCAILLEBOTTE.FR
