Forever Young — Mac Val, Vitry-sur-Seine
Explosive, ambitious, joyful, and committed, the exhibition Forever Young at MAC VAL accompanies the museum’s anniversary with marvelous verve. Over the course of twenty years, the institution has become a venerable monument, yet it has never renounced its commitment to exploring the issues and challenges of its time and of the identities it helps to shape.
Exhibition : Forever Young — 20 ans du MAC VAL from June 14 to December 31. Learn more With a profuse selection of artists working in highly diverse practices, Forever Young nevertheless conveys a collective spirit oriented toward exploration and the sensitive dimension of personal emancipation. Proposals abound: mental universes recreated from the accumulation and fusion of mass images (Mario D’Souza, Garush Melkonyan, Maïlys Lamotte-Paulet…), stagings rooted in ritual and tradition, attempts to break away through singular aesthetic abstractions (Camille Brée, Richard Otparlic…), or hybrid appropriations that combine them.
Like a leap through time, the curatorial vision holds up a mirror with the same curiosity and audacity as twenty years ago, but this time directed toward a generation only just beginning to take hold of these codes. A moving scene of children of the 1990s and 2000s (and one absent figure made present, Mehryl Ferri Levisse, to whom the exhibition pays tribute) who share a personal history with this unique museum, faithful to its original mission: to make demanding art accessible to all audiences and, in doing so, to serve as a matrix for new generations of artists.
With care and consistent talent, curator Frank Lamy guides both this new generation and the visitors through a vibrant odyssey of feelings, struggles, inventions, and questions. The curatorial approach favors associations of ideas, sensitive resonances, and daring contrasts rather than rigid classifications. The works engage in dialogue through juxtapositions, echo each other, sometimes contradict one another — yet the scenography weaves them into a fluid and polyphonic narrative of strongly marked personalities.
An acrobatic balancing act emerges, weaving a coherent thread between works that bring together the expansive and the intimate, the understated and the dazzling. This sense of horizontality honors a generation that increasingly frees itself from hierarchies, embraces its precariousness, and refuses to be weighed down by unifying or dogmatic theories. Behind the softness of pastel colors, behind the modesty of faded tones, fantasy often rumbles beneath the surface. Nietzsche put it best: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” Here, the fertile disorder of feelings is exposed for all, in order to engender the tumult of the new.
From monumental signage where a single word proclaims revolt (Aïda Bruyère), to the prolific staging of self that exposes the biases of social perception (Coco de RinneZ); from ceramics, meticulous like miniature models of imagination recalling the incendiary nature of the material — crowned with the injunction “Burn them all” (Jordan Roger) — to graphic works in ink or the materialization of mental architectures (Grichka Commaret), the exhibition stretches wide but coheres. The multidimensionality of these practices asserts art as the exposure of self.
Even within the hybrid confrontations of a single work: the striking videos and sculptures of Kim Farkas, projecting us into a world whose dissonance seems unalterable, or Chadine Amghar’s accumulations, erecting a monument resonant with the very polyphony of signs. Depending on one’s lived experience and cultural background, her use of urban elements oscillates between unease and affection (pigeon), threat and delight (scooter), banality and preciousness (cinder block, watermelon). Immediately intelligible, even to those unfamiliar with the Parisian neighborhoods evoked by Barbès — Château — Rouge, the work plays with uncertainty; by leaving each viewer to confront their own affects, the plastic medium testifies to a restless energy that places practice at the very heart of meaning.
Indeed, the motif of the hand, of the gesture, in its fragility and persistence, gradually emerges as the central pole of a creation in continuous learning — for the artists as much as for those who encounter their works. And this is the first lesson, at once obvious and unexpected, that emerges: youth is not in the head, it is in the hand. At the flick of a finger and the blink of an eye, it proliferates, bursts forth, and seeds all those who approach it. This is the second lesson: it renders pleasure eternal, as long as we dare to confront it and struggle to (re)claim it.
