The Fondation Fernet-Branca invites you to discover an exhibition dedicated to the work of Jean Messagier, one of the most unique and influential painters of his generation, with a deeply personal and intimate pictorial universe.
His work is among the most important in the history of modern art and abstract painting in the second half of the 20th century. This exhibition, featuring more than one hundred and ten works, traces his artistic journey by moving backward in time: starting from his later works that seem to give precedence to form, as they crystallize the magnificent achievements of his life's work as a painter, his story, his stories, and moving back to his early works where the characteristics of his art that reached absolute abstraction in the late 1960s were first established. We have deliberately only alluded to the surprising works of the 1970s and 1980s, which have been the subject of recent presentations.
In his ultimate achievements, everything is ordered, sublimated, within the confines of the painting, the art. The most innovative experiments, formal ruptures, the movements from one medium to another— from painting to engraving, from drawing to sculpture, from happening and performance to poetry—the oscillations between the ephemeral and what "freezes" time in the timelessness of the work, all "stop" in each painting of this final moment. Did he foresee it when he wrote, facing one of his paintings: "I am seized with great fear because this is the first time that my work stands before me in pure abstraction,
and yet with a terrible presence." Rewinding the timeline of Messagier's work is not a journey along a tranquil river but rather a ride along a river with the temperament of rapids, sometimes peaceful, sometimes torrential. Messagier's work was made up of leaps, formal ruptures, brutal recoveries, in short, battles between form and content, signifiers and the signified. Like making snow sculptures while simultaneously creating bronze sculptures, or bringing forth, manifesting a crude figure of interlacing, resolutely abstract arabesques traced by an imperative gesture and glittered like a pop painting. If we have neglected this period of "excesses" that were the 1970s and 1980s, it is, as mentioned earlier, because the works of that time have been often and very well exhibited. Mocked during the 1981-1982 exhibition at the Grand Palais, they have, since the beginning of this century, been sought after and praised for their provocative audacity. Perhaps today, it is necessary to dare to confront them with the figurations that have been in vogue since the 1980s, since the exhibitions A New Spirit in Painting in London, and After Classicism in Saint-Étienne. And particularly with those of the Italian Transavanguardia! With those of Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa, Gérard Gasiorowski?
Crédit : Atlas Studio