Re.Painting - off-site
Collective show with Luc Bouzat, Thomas Kohl, David Leapman, Stefan Sehler, Isabelle Viallat and Alun Williams.
Curated by: François Bazzoli and Alun Williams
December 19-23, 1997, and January 5-17, 1998
La Vigie - Art Contemporain, 32 rue Clérisseau, 30000 Nîmes
Re.Painting aims to bring together the work of French, German, and British painters who have primarily sought to avoid the wave of “Neo” in a desire to let painting speak for itself. These painters do not form a group, and their work addresses diverse questions. While always innovative, their work is never strictly figurative, yet it cannot be definitively classified as abstract either.
In the current era dominated by the “Neo” and the “Pseudo,” much of the work produced by young artists and brought to public attention could have been made at any point in the past thirty years.
The same cannot be said for the painters participating in Re.Painting.
Among the key thinkers on painting in this century—Picasso, Duchamp, and Greenberg—despite their vast differences, all pointed toward a strikingly similar path for the future of painting.
For them, the reinvention of painting through innovation in its language, without rejecting the possibility of figurative references, was essential. The painters of Re.Painting have attempted to follow this path. In their work, figurative reference may appear in different ways—through residues or fragments of representation, or through the evocation of certain aspects of visual reality via an innovative use of paint and varied materials.
In each case, the interaction between these elements and painting itself highlights painting as a substance that expresses itself—an entity that is both deeply connected to and independent of any image it may construct, and one that is thus capable of transcending those images.
Text from the exhibition catalog, 1996.
