Art & Commitment: A Focus on the French Scene at Art Paris 2023

What can art do in these worrying times when war is raging on Europe’s borders, totalitarian states perdure or are reappearing in different areas of the globe and identity-based conflicts threaten social cohesion and the very spirit of democracy. A world in which, faced with climate change, the proposed solutions are derisory if not fundamentally flawed? The answer is nothing - and everything.

As Friedrich Nietzsche said: “The artist has the power to awaken the strength to act that lies dormant in other souls”. By considering art through the prism of commitment, we are admitting that artists can indeed, if not change the world at least contribute to its transformation. It also serves to remind us that works of art possess the capacity to crystallise the fears of the real world and turn them into symbols, allegories or icons of universal significance: Guernica being the perfect example. And finally, it means we recognise the support provided by everybody in the art world in the broadest sense of the term. Not only artists, but also husbands and wives, friends, gallery owners, collectors, publishers, art historians and critics, not forgetting museum and exhibition curators. In short, the very lifeblood of all those places where art is created, produced, shown, shared, and conserved; all the people who have always wanted to be “of their generation”.

These artists’ commitment comes in answer to the massacres, violence, oppression, discrimination, and acts of injustice that are ubiquitous today. It is they who shout out and denounce what is happening in zones of conflict or, for the more discreet among them, tell the stories of ordinary lives that are crisscrossed with never-ending struggles, with hopes and dreams that they reduce to their common denominator. But there are also people prepared to lend a helping hand, sometimes putting their own lives in danger in so doing. By helping a community, their own or another - foreigners, immigrants, refugees, in short, all the oppressed and banished people who have become nameless faces on the road to eternal exile - they establish a certain image of France and art in France. In parallel - and without contradiction - there is the commitment made by certain artists to the creative act itself, to which they decide to devote their entire life. Let’s not forget however that the insatiable desire to create what summons them into the studio is a false retreat, a feigned solitude when balanced against the extent to which their practice considers “the” world and opens out to other worlds.

Providing a comprehensive panorama of the question would require considerable means and multiple analyses, something that a selection of 20 artists, 20 artworks and 20 exhibiting galleries is ultimately unable to provide. Nevertheless, I dare to hope that - above and beyond this selection that obviously goes hand in hand with the selection on exile by Amanda Abi Khalil - this current need to make a commitment will pervade every level and every aspect of Art Paris 2023 and that everybody will apply their strength and courage to making it their own.

Four guiding figures have been deliberately placed at the heart of this selection, the first of whom is Nancy Spero. The American painter’s work gained recognition in France in the 1950s and it was while living in Paris that she was profoundly touched by the work of Antonin Artaud. On her return to the United States, she immediately took a stand against the Vietnam War and in defense of the cause of women. Other artists in the selection could be her great granddaughters, or perhaps sisters would be the better term: Cameroonian artist Angèle Etoundi Essamba, whose entire body of photographic work focuses on the figure of the African woman; Afghan artist Kubra Khademi who endeavours, by means of performance art and drawing, to regain the character and power inherent to women and which cannot be expressed in her home country; Moroccan artist Randa Maroufi, who describes herself as “undisciplined” and whose photos and films question masculinity and feminity; Chilean artist Paz Corona, who lays bare bodies and identities in her paintings. Of Polish descent, artist Apolonia Sokol whose paintings are like small theatres full of hieratic figures grappling with everyday life, their feelings and emotions; French artist Prune Nourry, whose interest lies in bioethical questions in connection with the gender imbalance and the misuse of new technologies for gender selection; not forgetting Laura Henno and RaKaJoo, who have both taken onboard the complex notions of identity and exile: isolated and uprooted migrant communities, for one, a generation that is both lost and forged by its double Afro-European culture, for the latter.

The second central figure is in fact double. It comprises on the one hand Jacques Grinberg (who was born Djeki Grinberg in Bulgaria), a representative of what was called in the 60s and 70s Nouvelle figuration - in opposition to the Second School of Paris, the Nouveau réalisme and the Figuration narrative - and on the other, the latter’s recently deceased founder, Hervé Télémaque. Both these artists’ works are, each in their own way, biting, dark, scathing and always tinged with irony. This same irony of despair – or should that be derision – can also be seen in the work of Sudanese artist Hassan Musa and French artist Damien Deroubaix, who both tirelessly revisit the painting of “History” (with a capital “H”) in order to paint “our” history, or rather those events from which we rapidly distance ourselves by leaving them within the framework of continuous news channels - the same channels that Alain Josseau tirelessly examines. And let’s not forget Iranian artist Sépànd Danesh, whose paintings comprise a corner with neither floor nor ceiling, a space symbolising both a dead end and a possible means of escape from the threat of obscurantism.

The third of our figures is Paul Rebeyrolle. Rebeyrolle’s barbarous paintings presage a world in which man’s cynicism leads him to destroy the human condition and his relationship with the living world. We find the self-same hand-to-hand combat with the creative process in the work of Zimbabwe-born Duncan Wylie, who actively confronts painting’s different forms, light and colour with multiple coloured layers that become entangled, diffracted and fractured.

The same is true for Vietnamese artist Thu Van Tran, who delves into the cracks in the image and in history in order to reconsider both the importance of materials and the materiality of words and their meanings. This combat is also present in the work of Agathe Pitié, who immerses us in her own improbable and joyous drawn hybrid worlds, which are the same size as a sheet of paper and yet contain a multicultural and universal caravanserai of creatures and spirits of all origins and in Agathe May’s dogged exploration of engraving, in which she turns a sometimes whimsical and sometimes alarmed eye on the world, always remaining lucid when confronted with overconsumption and the pillaging of our environment with which we seem to have lost our roots.

As Germaine Tillion reminds us: “Resisting is existing”. If art cannot change the world, some artists resist whatever the cost, standing up to the blows that rain down. And the very existence of their art forces us to turn an even keener eye on history and current events, on art and reality. And so, in this spring of 2023, I wanted to look to the commitment, contestation, determination and clairvoyance of these artists and their works and extract the embers that continue to burn in the face of the ever deeper obscurity darkening our skies.