Oeuvres de Davide Balula, Célèste Boursier-Mougenot, Danica Dakic, Ceal Floyer, Jesper Just, Jan Kopp, Christian Marclay, Carsten Nicolaï, Caecilia Tripp.

Cette exposition, dont le titre facétieux détourne un tube pop fameux, fait le constat d’une résurgence d’œuvres sonores dans la création plastique actuelle. Essentiellement composée d’œuvres récemment acquises par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, l’exposition interroge les nouvelles règles de composition et les nouveaux modes de création aussi bien dans le domaine musical que dans celui de l’art contemporain.

Cette rencontre entre la musique et les arts visuels résulte souvent d’une réflexion sur la notion même d’objet d’art mais également sur les limites des institutions auxquelles ceux-ci sont destinés. Musées ou salles de concert conditionnent des formes d’art qui n’entendent pas rester figées. Ainsi, des musiciens tels que Céleste Boursier-Mougenot ou Carsten Nicolaï, sans jamais se départir de leurs propres recherches musicales investissent de façon volontaire et naturelle des lieux d’exposition.

De grands artistes mènent également aujourd’hui une carrière de musicien : Par exemple, Christian Marclay, dont on verra bientôt un important projet autour de la collection du Musée de la Musique à Paris et qui dans une œuvre acquise cette année par le FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, conjugue le reportage photo dans la lignée des graffitis de Brassaï, avec l’ « interdétermination » et l’ouverture musicale que John Cage a apporté à la création contemporaine. C’est également le cas du jeune artiste Davide Balula dont le travail remarquablement silencieux et poétique n’en est pas moins le fruit des recherches musicales qu’il mène en parallèle.

Par ailleurs, d’autres artistes font des propositions qui questionnent de façon radicale et nouvelle la sculpture ou l’installation en tirant un parti inattendu des théories musicales les plus récentes. Ceal Floyer propose ainsi un dialogue entre installation sculpturale et technique du déphasage telle que Steve Reich a pu la définir et la développer.

Enfin, la musique est fortement liée à des contextes sociaux et culturels qui en font souvent la force. Caecilia Tripp dans sa relecture d’un texte de Gertrude Stein remet ainsi en perspective la créolisation de la culture afro-américaine au travers du rythme de la parole mais aussi de la musique hip-hop. Plus près de nous Danica Dakic dans un camp de réfugiés Roms au Kosovo utilise la musique comme un moteur de libération et de cristallisation des zones sombres de l’Histoire récente de l’Europe.

Sur une proposition de Laurence Hazout Dreyfus, à partir du 12 janvier, une dizaine d’artistes du Pavillon du Palais de Tokyo, formation post-diplôme internationale, présenteront au FRAC des œuvres inspirées de l’exposition et remettront en perspective les interrogations nées de ce dialogue entre arts plastiques et musique. Ce sera également l’occasion d’une nouvelle présence de jeunes artistes internationaux en Champagne-Ardenne.

Residence / encounter beginning 17 May /
Exhibition from 3 June to 30 October 2005 /

private viewing Thursday 2 June 2005 beginning 6pm /

Travel, movement, a sense of place, these are central to the work of Franz Ackermann. For him they are a method of working, a recurrent theme and an essential element in the creation of his art. Ackermann, though basically a painter, eagerly combines techniques and materials. Murals, photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations and architectural elements compose organic worlds that are invasive, dense, symphonic, baroque and psychedelic. His work makes a powerful statement, completely taking over the spectator, submerging us in a flood of flamboyant colours. Circular and spiral movements reinforce the sensation of primeval chaos in works which for all that are perfectly controlled and composed.
Franz Ackermann skilfully combines two discrepant scales. The one is pocket-sized, journey-sized, close to his favourite theme of Mental Maps. These are imaginary topographies of towns he passes through. Feelings, memories and a subjective view of a foreign environment conjure up a kind of automatic writing. These little watercolours or brightly-coloured drawings with their oval shapes, resemble improbable stratigraphical soundings in a new version of the traditional travel sketch.
Evasions, on the other hand, is a series of gigantic pictures, monumental paintings that Franz Ackermann creates in his Berlin studio. These canvases are composed of broad sweeps of explosive colours, undulating watery shapes with unstable perspectives, whirling, concentric or receding, creating a disturbing visual tension, a permanent diversion from reality. In these installations, the spectator is faced with contradictory forces brought to bear both inside and outside the paintings, projecting us into the very heart of the composition.

The human figure is absent from Ackermann's work, with the exception of the image of the artist who from time to time manifests his ubiquity in a photograph or a figure representing him. However, his painting powerfully asserts that it is anchored in the social, geographical and anthropological realities of the contemporary world. They refer to the real but not to the visible. Ackermann offers us a vision rather than a point of view, a psycho-geography rather than a cartography or a rational analysis of territory. The works of Ackermann invent their own approaches to the world, where the banal and the hallucinatory, the trivial and the apocalyptic combine in an explosive perspective of utter novelty.

From 3 June to 30 October 2005, the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne presents the first one-man show in France of this German artist. Ackermann is one of the principal representatives of a renewal of painting in Germany. His work has been on show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Biennale in Sao Paulo (2002) and in Venice (2004), at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and in the Neugerriemschneider galleries in Berlin, Fortes Villaça in Sao Paulo, and Gavin Brown's Enterprise in New York. He is also one of the artists nominated for the 2004 Hugo Boss prize organised by the Guggenheim in New York. Franz Ackermann has designed an original project for the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne exhibition area.


Curators : Grazia Quaroni and François Quintin.

In conjunction with the exhibition an exhibition catalogue has been published by the FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, with the Presses du Réel, designed by M/M graphic artists, Paris.

Works by Gilles Balmet, Nicolas Boulard, Sylvain Bourget, Benoît Broisat, Julie Faure-Brac, Elie Cristiani, Julien Discrit, Ariane Michel, Jean-Rémy Papleux, Mathieu Simon.

Two years on from the exhibition Jeunisme 1, the Champagne-Ardenne regional contemporary art foundation is repeating its forward-looking experiment. The term "jeunisme" has often been used as a reproach, and rightly so, against institutional projects where mere youth is the aesthetic justification. Better, perhaps, to view the term "jeunisme" as a deliberate statement of intent, a possible and desirable commitment in favour of new work – bearing in mind that youthfulness in art is not a question of age, but rather one of constant evolution, of a determination to move in uncertain directions.
These exhibitions are meant to give a first sight of newly-created works by artists who have not yet won recognition from art institutions, and as such they seek deliberately to support creativity at the moment when it is often at its most fragile.

Jeunisme 2 is fed by the same commitment towards these artists. This exhibition not only affords them financial and logistic help to take the step of presenting new work in public, but also gives us an experimental area where the work can be revealed with all its vulnerability, its awakening questions and the individual sensitivity of each artist: Gilles Balmet, Nicolas Boulard, Sylvain Bourget, Benoît Broisat, Julie Faure-Brac, Elie Cristiani, Julien Discrit, Ariane Michel, Jean-Rémy Papleux and Mathieu Simon.
Whether self-taught, recently graduated from art school, or artists who have been producing work for several years, for many of them this is the first opportunity to unveil a new work in an institutional setting and place it before the public.

Jeunisme 2 is also an opportunity to bring together some major cultural figures from Reims who support contemporary art. The event Jeunisme 2 has been designed in partnership with, among others, the Saint-Exupéry cultural centre and the musical creation studio Césaré. The exhibition has been mounted in conjunction with the exhibitions of the cultural centre for childhood in Tinqueux.