The Partenaires particulaires exhibition acts like a field of (sometimes bad) seeds, starting with a knot bringing together a dozen historic works by Supports/Surfaces. This code name for a short-lived but still highly topical avant-garde movement marked the history of the French art scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s through a return to abstract painting in a raw version, augmented by a healthy dose of savoir-faire. Brushless paintings, stretcherless pictures, folded and burned canvases, assembled wood, stamped prints… These lines serve as a manifesto for La peinture en question, the first exhibition of a group that has continued to grow and self-criticize, only to leave each other in public. In 1969, Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Patrick Saytour and Claude Viallat asserted: “The object of painting is painting itself, and the paintings exhibited relate only to themselves. They do not appeal to an “elsewhere” (the artist’s personalitý, biography, art history, for example). They offer no escape, because the surface, through the ruptures of form that are operated upon it, prohibits the viewer’s mental projections or dreamlike ramblings.
The exhibition also features works by other artists, both historical and contemporary, from London, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Martinique and Paris. Kapwani Kiwanga, Brandon Ndife, Robert Overby, Lotus L Kang, Ernest breleur, Renée Levi, Jack O’Brien, Miho Dohi, Myriam Mihindou, Ladji Diaby, Torkwase Dyson, Melinda Fourn, Edith Dekyndt, Barbara Sanchez-Kane, Hall Haus… From painting to moving images, sculpture and design, the CAB Foundation brings together so many practices that manipulate the primary imaginations of precarious materials, from imprints to decomposed compositions, operations, moving and luminous abstractions, assemblages and recycling, etc. In this way, the stakes / the game lie in overcoming the blinkers, postures and boundaries that play on System D, the particle of matter.
For more information, click here.
