Curated by Mathieu Mercier.
Artists: Vincent Beaurin, Christophe Berdaguer & Marie Péjus, Julien Bouillon, Stéphane Calais, Sammy Engrammer, Marc Etienne, Daniel Firman, Huges Reip and Virginie Yassef
Exhibition for the 9th Prize Fondation d’entreprise Ricard.
Mathieu Mercier proceeded from the works themselves in curating the exhibit Dérive. A heterogenous and multiple landscape emerged from formal inclinations and spontaneous attractions between the various works. Still, that landscape was coherent enough to coalesce into a subject. While nature, and more particularly its representation, is not necessarily a recurring theme among the featured artists, it is nevertheless one of the stakes of the grouping.
While humans seem absent from it, they are in fact everywhere; each work testifies to the relation(s) between humankind and nature. This relation sometimes borders on nostalgia: the evocation of a lost paradise then becomes almost palpable. In other instances, it looks to the future and to technology, accepting the acceleration of mutations that they involve.
The diversity of viewpoints disrupts any effort to forge a single vision, an ecological discourse, or a gloomy or positive anticipation. Yet such a condensation -from an archaic nature, which may have witnessed the birth of humankind, to a synthetic one- makes it possible, between the conflicting desires to freeze time and to accelerate it, to think through a new relation to the world over the time of an exhibit.