October 12 - November 17, 2007.

« DERIVE »

With Wilfrid Almendra, Vincent Beaurin, Christophe Berdaguer et Marie Péjus, Julien Bouillon, Stéphane Calais, Sammy Engramer, Marc Etienne, Daniel Firman, Regine Kolle, Hugues Reip et Virginie Yassef.

The Fondation d'entreprise Ricard will present Dérive from October 12 to November 17 in premises freshly redesigned by architects Jakob and Mac Farlane. Artist Mathieu Mercier, the curator of the 9th edition of the Prix Fondation d'entreprise Ricard, conceived the exhibit around the works of 11 artists of the young French scene: Wilfrid Almendra, Vincent Beaurin, Christophe Berdaguer and Marie Péjus, Julien Bouillon, Stéphane Calais, Sammy Engramer, Marc Etienne, Daniel Firman, Regine Kolle, Hugues Reip and Virginie Yassef. The prize will be awarded during the Bal Jaune on October 19.
The Fondation d'entreprise Ricard also continues its partnership with the FIAC (Foire Internationale d'Art Contemporain) through its support of the Young Curator's Invitation program.

View exhibition, photo : F. Kleinefenn

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.

The Prix Fondation d'entreprise Ricard will be awarded to one of the artists exhibited on the occasion of the Bal Jaune on October 19