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Nage Libre: Sillon Contemporary Art Biennial
For the fourth time, the Sillon Contemporary Art Biennial travelled through the Drôme, setting up this year in Dieulefit, located on the left flank of the Rhône valley, not far from the Baronnies Provençales Regional Park, between Valence and Avignon. Unlike others who do so discreetly, the Biennial openly acknowledges its goal of promoting tourism. A first contact with modern art took place in Dieulefit during the Nazi occupation: 1,500 Jewish children, members of the Resistance, writers such as René Char, Pierre Jean Jouve, Louis Aragon, Elsa Triolet, Paul Éluard, Emmanuel Bove, Henri-Pierre Roché and the painter Wols found refuge thanks to the solidarity of this village, which today looks like an idyllic French village with its 3,200 inhabitants. The exhibition venues in this spa town were varied: a church, a large warehouse, a restaurant, a school, a cinema, a glass factory, a wash house, an old castle, a cemetery, and, among others, the municipal swimming pool.
The outdoor exhibition at the Jean Jouve municipal swimming pool was entitled Nage Libre (Free Swimming), which does not mean swimming freely in the open sea or a lake. Free Swimming is a category of swimming competition, defined by the rules of the International Swimming Federation. The name refers to a discipline practised in a 50-metre pool, in which part of the swimmer's body must break the surface of the water, but also touch the wall at the end of the pool at each turn. In turn, ‘Freestyle’ refers to the freedom to choose the swimming style, knowing, however, that 99% of athletes choose the ‘crawl’ - the fastest swimming technique!
So why this choice of title? What the two curators of the exhibition, Léane Lloret and Michel François, seek to do is ‘follow the continuous flow of emotions and states of mind’. According to them, ‘diving into the turbulent waters of the unconscious is synonymous with courage’. Michel François knows this from experience (participation in Documenta Kassel in 1992, and in the Belgian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1999), while Léane Lloret, born in 1999, curating one of her first exhibitions, is in tune with the new generation that both highlight. Nevertheless, artists from the sixty-something generation are also present at the Biennale, such as François Curlet and Ann Veronica Janssens, Erwan Mahéo, Jean-Paul Jacquet with Loïc Vanderstichelen. What unites the artists, including those in their forties and thirties, is, first and foremost, their belonging to the Brussels art scene and the friendships that bind them together. This is a living example of the famous Brussels solidarity among artists - one of the reasons, and not just the cheaper studios, for Brussels' attractiveness. In fact, of the 24 artists or collectives, 14 are from other countries, mainly France, but also Poland, Ukraine, the Netherlands, etc. Sixteen of them are dedicated to sculpture or even installation. Even the “star” of painting, Harold Ancart, from the Gagosian gallery, renounced his stage backdrop-style landscapes. The artist found it pertinent and curious to present, in the small empty pool, covered with white tiles like his pedestal, a model of another pool, perhaps more private than the one on which his plinth and model rested.
Hanging in the booths were a few pieces, starting with Feiko Beckers' seductive door handles, which refer to a quote by Alvar Aalto, saying that grabbing the handle is like grabbing the hand of the building. Outside, a plexiglass cube, filled with transparent paraffin and placed on a pedestal, a Cocktail Sculpture, as Ann Veronica Janssens calls them, diffracted the late summer sunlight. In an isolated cabin, a ceramic piece by Lucia Bru hung on the wall, resembling a thick sheet of A4 paper, with a mirrored but opaque surface, as if it had been erased.
A few booths further on, Michel François plays with the separation of spaces that temporarily see us naked. In each of the two booths, he places a piece of clothing or a clothing accessory, asking two essential questions: How to be born? How to eat? One of them, which corresponds to a belt filled with plaster, is titled Ma taille (si j’étais enceinte) and the other, Rien dans les poches, refers to a pair of trousers, whose slightly exaggerated pockets are filled with the same material as the belt. The two pieces date from 1991, ten years after the artist began her career and one year before she participated in Documenta IX in 1992.
Above the booths, leaning against the bar, a shiny bicycle is locked away in a barred shelter. Although the artist Grégory Decock lived in the region, in Crest, he probably had to go to Brussels to find kindred spirits who shared his serious sense of humour: the caged bicycle is the one that took the artist-cyclist from the Belgian city of Anderlecht, postcode 1070, 1070 km away, to Dieulefit. It is there, at the pool bar, that the artist presents the public with a set of cans of holy water from the Cathedral of Saint-Guidon in Anderlecht, in exchange for €10.70.
As we relax, enjoying the splendid view from the bar's beautiful arched terrace, with its 1950s wrought ironwork (a hint of Tati floats in the air), a teal-coloured glass question mark hangs above us. It hangs above a black ashtray from the luxurious Parisian brothel ‘Le Sphinx’, a hotspot for tout Paris and the Nazi occupiers during the 1940s. The artist François Curlet calls it Air de Paris Hilton et le Sphinx. The piece is an empty perfume bottle, filled with Paris air and offered by Marcel Duchamp to New York collectors. But it is also the name of his gallery. He sums up his proposal as follows: ‘1,2,3, soleil...’.
In places of passage, we find proposals that use modern media such as video, posters and photography. Thus, two posters, printed in white Arabic on a black background and framed, reproduce the words ‘murmures’ and ‘mot’, introducing Michel Leiris's account À la couleur et à la cri, translated by Andreu Poggio. In the village, we find them again, posted willy-nilly. In another corner, Loïc Vanderstichelen and Jean-Paul Jacquet have placed a television screen. Their fiction Problèmes cruciaux (the title of a seminar by Lacan, whose cover features a reproduction of Edward Munch's painting The Scream) takes place, among other locations, in an empty swimming pool, and moves from the register of ancient Greek drama to delirious absurdity.
Our wanderings lead us to Massao Mascaro's work, Vieni qua subito I, II, III, IV, V. Five photographic proofs in 48x38 cm format, with a generous white margin, present, like a musical score, a variation on the same theme: five kitchen towels, each folded differently. In Italian, a tea towel is called a ‘canovaccio’, which also means the intrigues from which actors draw elements to improvise dialogues on stage. And yet, Massao Mascaro's proposal has a discretion that is not at all theatrical. This term would make more sense for Erwan Mahéo's beautiful banner. Mer Verticale, 3x2 metres, dated 2014, is a set of 20 photographic strips superimposed on each other, captured on the shores of the island where the artist lives, then printed on fabric. The waves and, at their peaks, the reflections of the sun merge, further accentuating the blurring caused by the wind. Léane Lloret writes: ‘The perspective that extends to the horizon makes the waves diminish in the distance.’ Proudly, this banner at the exit announces the water that first attracted us.
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