Painting is dead, long live painting! It's no longer time to scream from the rooftops with tremolos in the voice that it is back. Nor to dramatically overplay this reappearance by comparing it to that of the zombies: neither dead nor alive, both outdated and so there, both devitalized and still gesticulating, so haunted by the great classical masters and unable to compete with them. In our eyes, the painting is today in a very desirable state of form. It is prominently featured on all the walls, fairs and collectors, museums, art centers, and foundations, not to mention Instagram. The offer is plethoric. The choice is vast. There is something, it seems, for all tastes - probably not for all budgets.i So it's a bit like a fan, without looking at the prices, that we put together this album of paintings, a bit like sticking thumbnails of football players in an album: by grouping, with stars in the eyes, our favorite paintings, in more or less well-balanced teams or in more or less reconstituted families. It seemed irrelevant to us to trust the old categories that mark the history of genres or pictorial movements, quite only because the artists themselves have exceeded them because they transgress them and combine them. With one exception, a trend long-neglected and which is gaining momentum: lyrical painting. Likewise, to refresh the software a little, we left out the pioneers, the elders, those who occupy the front of the stage and the first places of the art market: Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas, Elizabeth Peyton, Wilhelm Sasnal, Victor Man, Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha. Finally, these categories arbitrarily invented are oriented towards the idea and feel that painters seize today's world with a mixture of worry, disgust, and comics. Of weariness but also of hope
In painting, Lyricism refers to this movement tending towards a grandiloquent expressiveness, staining the canvas with sudden erasures and spurts, thrown eclectically. Or an evasive abstraction, lost in the limbo of the unconscious, born in the 1950s with Hans Hartung, Pierre Soulages and the School of Paris, that we had lost sight of until the paintings of the American Joe Bradley, or those of Samuel Richardot , do not dwell on this pictorial rhetoric, whose keywords are: impulsiveness, improvisation, action, and reaction. Not to mention a fetishistic connection to the natural elements, wind, water, earth, and air. This category could also be called elegiac abstraction, an ode to the medium as much as to nature, a colorful and chaotic imprint of the body's torments and the soul. We would also rank the paintings of the young Émile Vappereau , agglutinating a network of black, bushy lines, possibly enhanced with white or yellow. Or those of Jessica Warboys brushed with a solution comprising potassium and ammonium, mixture photosensitive to ultraviolet. The Welsh artist collects them in the early morning, on the beach where she subjected them all night to lunar rays in order to collect their imprint. There are also paintings by Emil Michael Klein . These offer on a white, slightly iridescent background, the eventful adventures of a blue line which, obviously, does as it pleases, branching out as it sees fit, taking to the right or the left, curling on itself, as long as it remains thin and supple. This neo-lyricism is the result of a savage stubbornness to let the painting do the trick. Far from the (modernist) gates, far from the compositions preconceived by the author, this abstract vein, caught up in the fresh air, frolic on the canvas.
© Beaux Arts