Au loin, une île ! — Une proposition de Marie Canet et Vanessa Desclaux — Fondation d’entreprise Pernod Ricard — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 9 → February 11, 2012

Au loin, une île à la fondation Ricard — Les nouveaux romantiques Les grandes expositions se reconnaissent à ce fait qu’elles incarnent autant qu’elles créent leur thème. Avec Au loin, une île !, c'est une compréhension inédite de la mélancolie qui se fait jour. Et si l'exposition réinventait tout simplement le romantisme ?

Ahoy, an island! is an exhibition devoted to the contemporary British art scene, even as a scene such as this cannot exist in and for itself, but may instead be an object of description, analysis, and fantasy. The difficulty of the initial proposition can thus be averted thanks to the singularity of two perspectives and a common approach developed out of an image, the island.

This ideological space and visual motif makes it possible to set up dialectic within the British political and cultural heritage to avoid hard and fast oppositions, but also to renew this heritage, to make it moving. The island is a geographic reality and an allegory, a position and the abstract representation of an elsewhere. A Romantic motif, it also represents exoticism and dream, the concretion of any insularity. It is an other space, a margin, an exile. It evokes the visual field of the earth against the sea. It is an oasis: there the sea is the sand, the water is the earth.

If an exhibition amounts to putting into perspective a history and a reading of forms, and if the look cast from overseas is necessarily uncertain, it produces as a consequence a play of mobile points of view. The perspective is neither chronological nor thematic. It proposes a line of sight, a subjective and critical point of view on an artistic scene rich in contradictions, defined both by its cultural diversity and its geographic and political insularity, at once a symbol of openness and mastery.