Tuesday 14 June at 6.30pm . Signing of the book by Maurice Fréchuret Effacer . Paradox of an artistic gesture .
Tuesday 14 June at 6.30pm . Signing of the book by Maurice Fréchuret Effacer . Paradox of an artistic gesture . Gerhard Richter, Tisch ( Table ), 1962, Oil on canvas, 90 cm x 113 cm, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Courtesy Gerhard Richter, 2016. Galerie Eva Vautier invites you to the signing of the new book by Maurice Fréchuret. In the artistic field, effacer (to erase) is synonymous with correction or modification. Commonly called « repentir » (pentimento), this intervention expresses clumsiness, even fault, and qualifies the work in what it has that is weak and inadequate. In the field of politics or commercial advertising, the practice of erasure is undeniably linked to lying and concealment. For decades, history has offered many examples of these fraudulent interventions aimed at correcting its course. Transforming this action, so fundamentally negative, into a practice capable of opening new possibilities is what artists achieved during the twentieth century and continue to achieve today. By practising erasure – that is, by working in reverse – they have exemplarily enriched artistic creation. Robert Rauschenberg’s historic gesture of erasing, in 1953, a drawing by Willem De Kooning, the exemplary proposals of Marcel Broodthaers , Claudio Parmiggiani , Roman Opalka , Gerhard Richter intersect, those more recent of Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ann Hamilton, Jochen Gerz , Felix Gonzalez-Torres but also those of artists of the current generation such as Zhang Huan or Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza … So many examples that invite us to reconsider this paradoxical gesture and henceforth to apprehend it as a genuinely artistic practice. Maurice Fréchuret was curator at the Musée d’Art moderne de Saint-Étienne from 1986 to 1993, then at the Musée Picasso in Antibes from 1993 to 2001, and director of the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux from 2001 to 2006. He was appointed curator of the national museums of the 20th century of the Alpes-Maritimes (2006-2014). Alongside his work as curator, exhibition organiser and teacher, he has published numerous books, including: Le Mou et ses formes (éditions ENSBA, 1993, Jacqueline Chambon, 2004); La Machine à peindre (Jacqueline Chambon, 1994); L’Envolée, L’enfouissement (Skira, RMN, 1995); L’art médecine (in collaboration with Thierry Davila, RMN, 2000); Les Années 70, l’art en cause (RMN, 2002); Exils (in collaboration with Laurence Bertrand-Dorléac, RMN, 2012).
