Flocons de l’été (sur tout ton corps sont tatouées des perles d’or)

From January 11 to March 2, 2025.

Opening Friday January 10, 2025 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the presence of the artists and the exhibition curator.

Under the title Les Flocons de l’été (golden pearls are tattooed all over your body), this exhibition offers a journey without beginning or end, accompanied by a dedicated soundtrack, which would stretch from an infinite summer day to a suspended winter night: “It’s winter, in summer / The sleepless night could last / All eternity / Far, so far, oneself exiled / Under the snowflakes of summer / The night could last / All eternity”.

The exhibition brings together twelve emerging artists living between Marseille, Paris and their suburbs – Jean Bosphore, Nicolas Boulben, Jean Claracq, Antoine Conde, Adrien Fricheteau, Lazare Lazarus, Lou Olmos–Arsenne, Jules Magistry, Julien Robles, Camille Roquet, Paul Rousteau and Victor Siret – who each explore in their own way the ordinary experiences of the eternal adolescents of the 2000s-2020s. A distraught youth who, in the heart of standardized and interchangeable urban suburbs, occupy their time in a fragmentary way, riveted to liquid crystal screens, between smartphone applications, video games and Netflix programs, or in streets and parks that are almost abandoned or neglected. The cinema of David Lynch, Gus Van Sant, Gregg Araki and Harmony Korine or the photographs of Larry Clark, Ed Templeton and Ari Marcopoulos regularly come up as references, even the work of David Hockney.

However, these twelve artists very paradoxically practice artistic techniques specific to the long term: tapestry, drawing with colored pencil, ballpoint pen or ink, engraving or monotype, or even particularly meticulous painting. Simple, touching and falsely innocent, their works therefore reveal complex and sometimes disturbing universes between nostalgia for the 1980s-2000s – this end of the last century when they were born, solitude and melancholy of the present time and projection into unexpected futures that they romanticize or fictionalize.

Beyond the torments, questions and hopes that it generates, they build their identity(ies) on the courage and intensity that can bring recognition if not self-affirmation, collective struggle and the gradual learning of confidence in others as in oneself and develop views on masculinity of a new kind. Of a wild and fierce beauty, their works bear witness to this with an unequalled force, determination and enjoyment.

Didn’t René Char profess: “Impose your luck, hold on to your happiness and go towards your risk. By looking at you, they will get used to it.”

Marc Donnadieu, curator of the exhibition.

Marc Donnadieu, the exhibition curator

Born in 1960, in Jerada, Morocco.
Marc Donnadieu is a researcher, teacher, art critic and independent exhibition curator. A member of ICOM since 2010, he was chief curator of Photo Élysée (Cantonal Museum for Photography, Lausanne, Switzerland) from 2017 to 2023, curator in charge of contemporary art at the LaM Museum of Modern, Contemporary and Outsider Art of Lille Métropole from 2010 to 2017, director of the Regional Contemporary Art Fund of Haute-Normandie from 1999 to 2010. A member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) France since 1997, he has regularly contributed to Art Press since 1994 and The Art Newspaper since 2023. He was awarded the Special Prize for the 10th anniversary of the AICA France Prize in 2022 and was made a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2004. He has also written or contributed to numerous monographic or thematic works in the fields of fine arts, photography, architecture, design or fashion. At the same time, he has been curator or co-curator of monographic or thematic exhibitions of reference devoted to the notion of commitment, to the processes of construction of identities and contemporary bodies, to the pictorial field, to drawing practices, to the relationships between art and architecture, as well as to the relationships between photography and art brut.

Photo credit : Mathilda Olmi