This exhibition brings together the award winners of the 60th Salon de Montrouge which ran from last 5 May to 3 June, selected by a jury presided by the filmmaker Olivier Assayas.

Normally speaking, they have nothing in common, except for the coincidence of this fleeting glory, and now this group presentation, which is taking the risk of putting their work into a “psychic” perspective. The title of this exhibition comes in fact from a song by Alain Bashung Au Pavillon des Lauriers, named after the wing of the psychiatric hospital where he sometimes stayed: “I want to stay mad”, he proclaimed, and “Je veille / Sur un grain de toute beauté” which might be paraphrased as “I loosen / So beautifully the screws”.

Right from the start, the visitors will find themselves plunged into the din of mental chaos, as orchestrated by Willem Boel. From this, Arthur Lambert’s metaphysical structures emerge. In an out-sized perspective, and inspired from the tunnels describedafter experiences of clinical death, he treats the familiar faces as treated by the brushes of Marion Bataillard and François Malingrëy, then entire bodies, extracted from these two artists’ huge compositions.

“Whether or not this is an allusion to madness, veiller sur un grain de toute beauté seemed to me to be one of the possible definitions of that ungraspable activity which consists in ‘making art’, and which Jean-François Lyotard saw as ‘introducing connections of the libido onto colour’. I may cite Bashung and Lyotard, but the actual form of the exhibition owes more to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa who, in The Leopard, set about uncovering the ‘deeper roots somewhere in one of these reasons which we call irrational because they are buried under layers of self-ignorance’. In the same way, it unfolds in space and in time, deep down, towards a blind point, we cross it while turning half round, as though glancing
back for the last time at a world we are leaving behind; then we progress along it as though through an extreme slow-motion tracking shot, while overall it forms a sophisticated zoom-out. The French word “grain” in the title thus takes on all of its possible psychiatric, meteorological, dermic and also pictorial nuances.”

Curator : Stéphane Corréard, assisted by Dahlia Sicsic

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