Gerard Fromanger, La France est-elle coupée en deux ? 1974, huile sur toile.
Encounter consisting of three roundtables, with art historians and artists..
Modernism is an emancipation of the original thinking of the Renaissance for which painting was dependent on literature and philosophy or the religious with its uplifting paintings. The artists have in their formal invention, their marked style, the affirmation of their writing faced with the narrative often imposed by the sponsor.
Modernism claimed an art independent of any narrative space, painting becomes independent of literature etc... geometric space in which the liberation of the artist passes by the refusal of any figuration. All creation will be centred on its own intrinsic, autonomous values made up of pure lines and colours. Through their artworks, the avant-garde artist participates in the transformation of daily life in a desire for social change and a search for a new and harmonious environment for contemporary man.
Conceptual art has often been received as the epitome of modernist thought, apart from Joseph Kosuth, Soll LeWitt or the minimal Carl André who did not exclude the narrative or the contextual in their writings.
Today the question of narrative is obvious in artistic production in general and more particularly in painting, we can cite the painters John Currin, Daniel Richter, Neo Raush or Jonas Burgert and Adrian Ghenie. In France this question of the narrative remains problematic, the ultimate rejection for a certain criticism where in art everything is possible except the narrative. Possible tales are timidly conceded. Narrative figuration was a counterpoint in its time, even a counter power to triumphant modernist hegemony.
The objective of this encounter is not to study this typically French rejection that gives insight into ideology with its transparencies and opacities, but rather to define narration or narrations in art and particularly in painting and to study its diverse, intelligible and sensitive forms.
Eric Corne
Conferences, "Exiting the grid of modernism: narration"
