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ROSES] - Seven painters from 1960 to the present day

 

From  5 to  February 8, 2020

Jacques Grinberg, Fernand Teyssier, Maryan,Mao To Lai,

Ilya Grinberg, Tereza Lochmann, Quentin Derouet

Color as "cultural construction".

Exhibition accompanied by the publication of a catalog comprising many reproductions and including an interview with Michael Pastoureau.

Read the interview with Michel Pastoureau: here

Read the presentation text:here

Download the entire catalog in PDF format:here 

Buy the printed catalog :Write us

 

Specialists in color in art all come to the same conclusion. “ Color is not just an eye phenomenon »[1], says (art historian) John Gage, developing an approach similar to that of (historian) Michel Pastoureau for whom “  color problems are first and foremost social problems". And (art historian) Georges Roque adds: “ the perception of colors is indeed a cultural, collective and historical activity »[2]. Finally, more recently, Hervé Fischer[3], artist and sociologist, made his contribution by approaching color as a “ ideological production ”.

Regarding pink, the habits and cultural codes of Western societies have established a preeminent link between this color and the ideas of softness, femininity, childhood, then sentimentality and kitsch. ; stereotypes transferred to associated objects: lingerie, baby clothes, dolls, sweets, etc.

If artists are carriers, as well as ordinary mortals, of these cultural constructions, they are not necessarily prisoners.

" When I put a green, it doesn't mean grass, when I put a blue, it doesn't mean sky ”, Matisse already said[4].

For Massimo Carboni, professor of aesthetics, “ the color never stays the same. We never find ourselves in front of red but in front of the uninterrupted variation of reds according to their "epochs", their quality »[5].

Likewise, the color pink – whether material, sensation or abstraction – encompasses a myriad of shades and connotations. Linguist Annie Mollard-Desfour has worked to identify and define them in an astonishing dictionary of pink[6].

This exhibition is calledRose[s], with a graphically supported "s". It is a question of provoking curiosity while affirming from the outset the plural and subjective dimension of the use of color by painters, in the service of their power of expression.

Maryan's palette is the starting point for reflection. How not to be struck by his almost systematic use of the color pink from 1965?

During the 1960s, the place of pink was just as remarkable in the paintings of Jacques Grinberg and Fernand Teyssier, as well as in those of a variety of other painters in France and the United States: Eduardo Arroyo, Leonardo Cremonini , Henri Cueco, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Maria Lassnig, Jacques Monory, Peter Saul, etc.

 

An exhibition on the idea of rose in art remains risky in view of the strongly negative connotations linked to this color, starting with the one in bad taste. The few projects already mounted on this theme[7] on the basis of university work were done by curators themselves artists, and as such probably more able to assume, even to claim their interest in the uses of this color in art.

Color remains, whatever the angles of approach, an exhibition subject most often considered “easy” and not very serious. Nevertheless, the considerable development over the last fifty years of the history of colors in art and of the study of the "color phenomenon" in general now provides a solid base.

It is not a question here of exploiting all these scientific resources, as a museum would do, to propose a grid for analyzing the uses of pink by each of the artists and to study their various meanings.

The ambition is to offer an original gateway to works that are still little known and to insist on the role assigned to color, including among artists who favor form and design.The works of Maryan and Jacques Grinberg, for example, are perceived as very “graphic”. However, color constitutes in many of their works a force as powerful as the line.

 

[1]John Gage, color in art, Thames & Hudson, Paris, 2009.

[2]George Roques,Art and science of color. Chevreul and the painters, from Delacroix to abstraction, Gallimard, Paris, 2009.

[3]Herve Fischer, The colors of the West, from prehistory to the 20th century, Gallimard, Paris, 2019.

[4]Henri Matisse, Writings and discourse on art, Hermann, Paris, 1972.

[5]Ivan Bargna (et al.),color in art, Citadels and Mazenod, Paris, 2006.

[6]Annie Mollard-Desfour, Le Rose, The Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Color Words and Expressions, CNRS Editions, Paris, 2002.

[7] The Exposed Color: Pink, Museumsberg, Flensburg, 2006 and Chinnretsukan Gallery of Tokyo, National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo/Japan, curator Barbara Nemitz; 50 shades of pink, 2011, at 59 Rivoli, Paris, curator Kevin Bideaux.

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