At Mac Val in Vitry-sur-Seine, artists put to the test of the news story – L’Express

At Mac Val in Vitry sur Seine artists put to the test

“A hypothesis in 26 letters, 5 equations and no answer”: its subtitle warns us straight away, the exhibition presented at the Mac Val in Vitry-sur-Seine resolves nothing. That’s good since we’re talking about news items here. Murders, blood, disappearances, suicides, investigations… So many ingredients summoned by the artists to understand these events which shake up everyday life, this “grain of sand which seizes the dreary routine of things”, in the words of Nicolas Surlapierre and Vincent Lavoie , the men orchestrate a rich journey of more than a hundred multidisciplinary works. Despite the public’s growing appetite for the genre, no exhibition in France had until then been devoted to its artistic analysis. We remember Crime and punishment at the Musée d’Orsay in 2010, but the brilliant demonstration remained limited to the criminal sphere.

At Mac Val, as a preamble, a series of monotypes signed Didier Paquignon for his work Whiplashwhich illustrate extravagant briefs gleaned from the press on the theme of the bestiary – as if echoing the ancestral column of “crushed dogs” –, reminds us that the news item is first and foremost this “bastard brother of information “dissected in his time by Roland Barthes. In line with the Dictionary for lovers of miscellaneous facts commissioned by Didier Decoin (Plon, 2022), the curators offer an ABC, from A (Assassination) to Z (Zoom), via H (Hemoglobin), I (Index), R (Reconstitution) or even U (Usurpation) , to highlight the diversity of forms and practices constituting the contemporary artistic corpus of the theme which draws on painting, photography, video, installation.

Didier Paquignon, “The Orvillecopter”, 2018.

/ © Didier Paquignon © ADAGP, Paris 2024

In Vitry, the 26 letters are unfolded, in as many approaches and without respect for alphabetical order, in the famous equations with one, two, three, four and five unknowns, each carrying a universe or an archetype “newspaper”: In the Name of the Law, Disaster Scenario, Do Violence, Open Your Eye, Shadow of a Doubt. Does all this seem very mathematical to you? It is, but only on the concept side. On the walls, another story is played out, that of the eternal fantasy that news items carry around, particularly when they are of a criminal nature, over which sometimes hovers the shadow of judicial error, the mystery of the unsolved enigma, capable of awakening the investigator who sleeps in each of us, or, forever insoluble, the voluntary erasure.

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Among other artists summoning the suicidal act, such as Philippe Ramette or Alain Séchas, Sylvain Fraysse takes up, in a series of engravings, the images from the police report recounting the search of Kurt Cobain’s Californian apartment after his suicide on 5 April 1994 in Seattle, which he entitled Rust Never Sleeps (“rust never sleeps”) in reference to the album of the same name.

From accumulated screen captures, Julien Audebert compressed the first part of the film into a single photograph M the Accursed by Fritz Lang, bringing together in the same snapshot all the witnesses to the murder of the little girl in their respective places, each protagonist thus becoming a potential suspect. As for Sophie Calle, the queen of artistic spinning who works around absence, disappearance and traces, she is of course part of the meeting, here with a work-text from 2023, We messed around too much : “Yesterday, a man, his wife and their two children were discovered hanging in their house. They left behind only this enigmatic phrase: ‘We messed up too much. Sorry.'”.

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