Long regarded as the poor relation of contemporary creation, painting is now a medium chosen and championed by many young artists, who are giving it renewed appeal.<\/p>\n
In the last few decades, while few art centres, FRAC structures (French regional collections of contemporary art) or museums have featured painting in their galleries, some institutions \u2013 the MASC ranking high among them \u2013 have successfully promoted painters of different generations. In schools of fine arts, whose faculties have long included only a smattering of painters, it is thanks to a few \u2018outsiders\u2019 that this art continues to be taught. Alongside these artists, such as Denis Laget in Saint-\u00c9tienne, Jean-Michel Alberola, Philippe Cogn\u00e9e and Fran\u00e7ois Boisrond, Nina Childress in Paris, Laurent Proux in Toulouse, Marc Desgrandchamps in Lyon and Fran\u00e7ois Maurige, Fran\u00e7ois Perrodin and Guillaume Pinard in Rennes, new generations are once again emerging to enhance the pictorial idiom.<\/p>\n
The exhibition, focusing on the work of some thirty painters born in the 1980s, will showcase these practices that call for a new form of history painting or forge links with literature or art history.<\/p>\n
Their works, newly completed and handpicked by the curator within the confines of the workshop, bear the imprint of the \u2018physicality\u2019 of painting, as a medium that not only involves a cosa mentale\u00a0(lit. a \u2018mental thing\u2019) but also a physical presence that is dependent on both intrinsic elements (such as the work\u2019s dimensions, substrate, material or colours) and external factors that determine how it is presented for display and its relationship to the space around it.<\/p>\n