Before you despair about the current state of the world, you can always purchase a contemporary piece of art for your living room. How about a painting Napoleon of Ai Weiwei made of Lego bricks, or of a canary in a cage or of Islamic sermons recorded on K7 audio? From October 20 to 22, at Paris+ by Art Basel, the best galleries in the world, as well as some emerging gallery owners, are exhibiting works intended to capture the spirit of the times and/or the money of collectors at the ephemeral Grand Palais.
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Canary. It’s a bit of an emblematic work reflecting the current state of our world. The little yellow bird is dead, lying in its galvanized steel cage on a pile of newspapers talking about climate change and other crises and cataclysms. And people walk by shrugging their shoulders. In the installation created by Mark Dion in 2023, the stuffed canary plays its disastrous role, like the canaries once brought into the mine to warn of an environment that has become deadly. So if our world were a canary, it would already be too late. Anyone wishing to prove their optimism can acquire the striking installation by the American visual artist for 40,000 euros at the In Situ gallery. For Ai Weiwei, the world is upside down anyway. At the Neugerriemschneider gallery, the Chinese artist posed his Napoleon – a replica of the famous imperial gesture immortalized by Jacques-Louis David – upside down, made up of 13,500 Lego bricks. And the fiery horse turned into a zebra.
The issues of our time
What remains of our dreams and promises of yesteryear? From the end of the Second World War through the events of May 68, the fall of the Berlin Wall to the hopes once placed in the advent of the 21st century? At first glance, the second edition of the Paris+ fair by Art Basel once again appears much more focused on business and much more neutral than its predecessor, the FIAC. But on the stands, many works enter into dialogue with the issues of our current era.
“ Be realistic. Ask for the impossible. » What are the means today to resist oppressive systems? The Jocelyn Wolff gallery is offering for 8,200 euros a set of twelve frames filled with pieces of paper of different sizes and colors on which anonymous people have handwritten protest slogans. A tribute by Czech artist Zbyněk Baladrán to the “revolution” of 1968 and the subversive method of resistance fighters during the Soviet Union era of secretly leaving small protest notes in bus stops or theaters in order to undermine state propaganda.
After each war, after each revolution, everything starts again. Why are people often so afraid of freedom? Why do we often have so much trouble managing it? Is Freedom therapeutic? (“ Is freedom therapeutic? “), is a sentence in illuminated red letters hung over four meters on the rails of the Berlin gallery Neu for $55,000. An allusion by the artistic collective Claire Fontaine to the ideological tension between confinement and liberation.
Parallel worlds
The Italian gallery Raffaella Cortese presents a successful allegory on migration and living together: Bottari Truck – Migrators (2023). In the photo, lit with a lightbox (120,000 euros), the Korean artist Kimsooja presents a scene from her crossing between Vitry and Paris highlighting several places linked to migration in France. Sitting on a pile of nomadic bundles, the bottaris, the performer quietly drives her little truck and her stories about the reception of refugees in France through the streets of the French capital.
At the Templon gallery, while the Senegalese artist Omar Ba confronts us with his Parallel worlds (2023) on the border between abstraction and figuration, with a man bowing in the center, his compatriot Alioune Diagne invites us to Prayer (2023), a meditative scene that touches you with its simplicity and humanity.
Doubly touching is a fragile hand placed on a door. The fingers and the back of the hand betray a long life behind them. The pastel reinforces the emotion and imagination provoked by Karol Palczak. The Polish artist immortalizes here both a portrait of his mother and of the Polish-Ukrainian border region, abandoned, militarized and shaken by crises, in which he lives here with his mother. A work presented by the Emalin gallery for 4,500 euros.
Radical sermons from imams at 230,000 euros
A banal picnic scene is staged in an astonishing way by Marc Padeu. His oil painting (Peres Projects gallery, $55,000) shows a family reunion, At the meal after baptism (2023), but the elusive aspect comes from the proximity of the scene to church frescoes that the artist loves to frequent. And we almost have the impression that the Cameroonian artist also uses the color palette of certain apostles.
As seductive as it is frightening, is a large installation made up of 891 old audio cassettes that line an entire wall. Today, these recordings of radical sermons by imams from the 1980s serve both as witnesses to the advent of fundamentalism of that era in reaction to frenzied modernization and Westernization, but also as a warning not to underestimate the dynamics of technological revolutions and today’s extremism. An alert from the Saudi artist Maha Malluh whose work’s value is estimated at 230,000 euros by the Tunisian gallery Selma Feriani.
So what ? Still haven’t found the work of art that suits you? There will certainly come a day when you want to say “thank you” to someone. That too is possible, thanks to Paris+. Installation Thank you by the Dutch visual artist Lily van der Stokker is offered by the Air gallery in Paris for 35,000 euros.
► From October 20 to 22, Paris+ by Art Basel, at the ephemeral Grand Palais