<p>A new generation of artists brings fresh energy to the medium</p>

Emmanuelle Lequeux

 The future of French painting

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<p>Is French painting immortal? It wasn’t always thought to be so. ‘Being a painter in France just 15 years ago wasn’t exactly a street paved with gold – it actually sucked,’ says the artist Eva Nielsen, who participated in last year’s Lyon Biennale of Contemporary Art. ‘When I went to England to study at the end of the 2000s, I apologized for being a painter! But there, they didn’t understand why.’ Now, Nielsen is a sought-after exponent of the medium, which is currently being celebrated in the exhibition ‘Immortal: Vitality of Young French Figurative Painting’ at MO.CO. in Montpellier.</p>
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<p>Vibrant and varied, recent French painting has caught people’s attention with its figurative, or predominantly figurative, style. More than a trend, it appears to stem from a deeper urge: to describe the world today and speak of ourselves in paint. From a feeling of emptiness comes a vital need to create images, in spite of everything – a need to find order in the visual barrage that engulfs us, or to impose our very own muddle: painting in an era of screens. </p>
<p>It’s impossible, in reality, to extricate yourself from the grip of technology. So, young painters work with it instead, thereby attempting to weaken its power. A graduate from Les Beaux-Arts in Marseille, Amélie Bertrand evokes a floating world, painting with bold colors and flatness, eschewing the depth offered by Photoshop or InDesign. ‘I never try to create real spaces, only painted spaces,’ explains the 37-year-old.</p>
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<p>Molinier spent much of his career working in isolation, exiled from local and national art scenes. He was thrown out of the Bordeaux Salon des Indépendants in 1951 amidst controversy over his orgiastic painting of the same year, <em>Le Grand Combat</em>. The Surrealists likewise first exhibited and then rejected him. His paintings and photomontages, in which he cut up and rearranged his own image, turning it into a many-limbed, multi-sexed  being, certainly appealed to the group’s interest in repressed desires, fetishism, and the transgression of bourgeois morals. In any case, Molinier’s manipulated self-portraits and depictions of himself as a rubber sex doll, had more in common with those on the margins of Surrealism like Bellmer and Claude Cahun. It was only in the last years of his life that he was rediscovered by a generation of artists exploring gender performance, like the Swiss artist, Luciano Castelli. Molinier was included in the groundbreaking 1974 exhibition, curated by Jean-Christophe Ammann ‘Transformer: Aspects of Travesty’ at Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland and posthumously he achieved notoriety, influencing artists as diverse as Ron Athey and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artist/8291/Cindy-Sherman">Cindy Sherman</a>.</p>

<p>In the photomontages <em>Mélange des godemichés et jambes </em>(1967) or<em> Triomphe, les jambes d’amour </em>(1968), asses are exposed and stockinged legs float, but unattached to a body of either sex. Even where a penis is shown, it is often a dildo, rendering it unclear whether the sex is hetero-, homo-, or purely auto-erotic. His body is multiplied, making love to itself: an image of&nbsp;what Freud would diagnose as&nbsp;homosexual narcissism. But since he wants to have sex with himself as a woman, this seems oddly like straight sex. Mixing desire with identification isn’t a Queer pathology, but simply a part of all sexuality in which gender is something longed for and never achieved.</p>

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<p>Nielsen is searching for the same alchemy and has chosen to mix painting and screen printing. An admirer of Sigmar Polke and Robert Rauschenberg, she explains: ‘I like the unpredictable side [of screen printing]; you never reach the end of the process. I watch how the substances miss each other or repel each other; I try to control this state of randomness.’ Using this technique, she is able to work on ‘flatness and volume in the same composition. This corresponds to the reality that we experience, everything superimposed. I’m very inspired by suburban landscapes, those fragments of the city seen from the train, the blurry transformations.’ This summer, she will exhibit her latest pieces in Arles; these were created from her wanderings in a wintry Camargue landscape and screen printed, as ever, to create the effect of ‘layers of memory – because the desire to capture time is very strong when you are painting.’</p>
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<p>In a society that can feel relentless, time is a central preoccupation for these artists. Since the beginning of her career, the young Paris-based Venetian painter Giulia Andreani has been rummaging through archives. The Cold War, the massacres of 1914, feminist struggles, and Resistance are all evoked in photographs that are part of our collective consciousness. ‘I work on the faces of memory,’ she likes to say. She hunts down forgotten ghosts, inserting them in her compositions in Payne’s Grey, her signature color. For the exhibition of Condé Nast’s photographic archives, currently on show at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, she created a large triptych, where ‘past, present, and future collide – a bombardment of signs. In a watermark, I wanted to bring out the idea of empowerment through images.’ A little girl with a boyish hairstyle stares at us; next to her is Saint Lucy, patron saint of the blind. The martyr’s gouged-out eyes form a flower that she holds in her hand – reminding us of the power of painting in the face of our blindness. </p>
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<p>Group show<br>‘Immortelle’<br>MO.CO. Panacée, Montpellier<br>Until May 7, 2023<br></p>
<p>Emmanuelle Lequeux is a writer based in Paris.</p>
<p>English translation: Catherine Bennett.</p>
<p>Published on April 25, 2023.</p>
<p>Caption for full-bleed images, from top to bottom: 1.&nbsp;Jean Claracq, <em>NightClub sous cadre</em>. Courtesy of the artist and Sultana. 2.&nbsp;Amélie Bertrand,&nbsp;<em>Once upon a time in the prairie</em>, 2022.&nbsp;Photograph by&nbsp;Aurélien Mole.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist and&nbsp;Semiose. 3.&nbsp;Mélanie Delattre-Vogt with atelier Michael Woolworth,&nbsp;<em>Nuage II</em>, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. 4. Eva Nielsen,&nbsp;<em>BMW Doline Arles</em>, 2023.&nbsp;Courtesy of the artist and Jousse-entreprise. 5. Installation view of Giulia Andreani’s artwork&nbsp;<em>Fabulation</em> at&nbsp;Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2023. Photograph by&nbsp;Marco Cappelletti © Palazzo Grassi, courtesy of Galerie Max Hetzler.</p>

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