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Suspended women by Spanish artist Pilar Albarracin at Fiac 2018. Siegfried Forster / RFI

This Thursday, October 18th, the Fiac, essential event of the international art market, opens its doors to the Grand Palais in Paris. The great International Fair of Contemporary Art has managed to remain both an elitist fair and a popular event, thanks to the monumental sculptures and installations that populate the squares and parks of Paris. The heart of the event still beats under the vast nave of the Grand Palais housing the selection of 195 galleries from 27 countries, awaited by collectors from around the world.

With the Cycloidal Ramp , a skate track designed by Raphaël Zarka on the edge of the Grand Palais and the colorful rays of paint, lying on the asphalt by the artist duo Lang & Baumann to visually connect the Petit and the Grand Palais, the Fiac 2018 takes its hat off street art. Inside the fair, the proposals remain rather classical in form. But around these paintings, sculptures, installations or photographs arise the concerns of our time. At Fiac, one seeks to be troubled and to find oneself with one's suspended certitudes.

How to take the temperature of the art market ?

Let's start with this beating bronze heart, titled Fan of Caresses, directed by the Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret , exhibited at the David Kordansky Gallery. One of three suspended works-organs sold for $ 90,000. Both sculptures and bells, they make visible these vital organs normally hidden, and are able to provide visual and sound sensations to the viewer.

The director of the gallery, Kurt Mueller, came from Los Angeles to take the temperature of the art market in Paris. On the other hand, the thermometer, which plays a disconcerting role in Torbjorn Rodland's photograph Fever (Fever) (2009-2018), a Norwegian artist living in Los Angeles, has nothing to do with the question, he says. : " The picture shows the back of a woman with a thermometer between her thighs. In fact, you can not read the temperature [laughs], but it's on one side a comical situation, on the other side confusing. It's an endless story that stays suspended and you have to make your own conclusion ... "

"French Bulldog" (2018), by Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, exhibited at the Fiac at the Max Hetzler Gallery in Berlin. Siegfried Forster / RFI

Art, a visual trap

Who can resist the ingenuous look of a dog with a beautiful flower? French Bulldog (2018), a simple wooden panel transformed by the painting of oil into an animal icon on the human scale, is striking in its simplicity and efficiency. Exhibited at the Max Hetzler Gallery in Berlin, this visual trap of Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille (born respectively in Belgrade and Boulogne-sur-Mer, they live in France) is a bit like Jeff Koons Tulips , but at 20 000 euros (excluding taxes), their sculpture is certainly more affordable and easier to cast than the work of the American star.

A strange and seductive experience promises the work (already sold) of the South Korean artist Park Seo-Bo, one of the founders of Dansaekhwa, a major movement of contemporary art in Asia. Its title Scripture No. 180118 (2018) adds to the confusion created by the vibrant and disturbing effect of the two-meter-wide painting, whose red color manifests itself both as a monochrome painting with multiple colors, as a plastic work in its own right and as an artist's written expression: " For him, his motifs and lines are a form of writing," explains Vanessa Clairet of Galerie Perrotin. There is no contradiction between writing and painting. It is a form of abstract expression of its own. "

Women hanging on a rope

Stories literally suspended are found at Pilar Albarracin. The Spanish artist hung six meters from the walls of the Vallois gallery a triptych of photographic portraits of women suspended as pieces of meat: À point , Bleue , Bleeding . " The women are hanging on a rope , we detail the artist, with flamenco dresses and other signs of the Spanish tradition. They are suspended because their lives are a little suspended. I wanted women not to touch the ground. Everything is flying. "

Very disturbing is the encounter with the installations of American artist Matthew Angelo Harrison, exhibited at the Jessica Silverman Gallery. There is this gutted and half open head of a tribe from Mozambique and Tanzania, Dark Silhouette : Synthetic ipiko n. 4 , of 2018. The interior molded in polyurethane resin and filled with aluminum parts makes it both reminiscent of medical experiments and African-American workers in the auto industry of Detroit, the artist's hometown and where he worked in the design department at Ford. Next door is a pair of West African wooden carvings, immersed in two boxes reminiscent of the macabre cabinets' conservation liquids ...

Matthew Angelo Harrison, "Dark Silhouette: Synthetic Ipiko n. 4 ", of 2018. Siegfried Forster / RFI

Being African-American, is it between two worlds ?

The artist explores the relationship between colonial history, technology, culture and the identity of African-Americans in his own way: " As an Afro-American, we feel a distance between an African identity and a constant struggle to have a feeling related to where you live. My work explores this in-between. I do not want to shock people. I just want to express those difficult states of feeling permanently between two worlds. "

The installation is called César (2018), although the French artist of Algerian origin Mohamed Bourouissa does not have a direct link with the famous sculptor César recently celebrated at the Center Pompidou. Whatever ... prices are already climbing a few tens of thousands, there is also a common taste for the material of recovery and especially a great will to reinvent the sculpture. The large photographic silver prints mounted on bodywork elements and metal plates, give the portrait-sculpture of more than two meters high a certain chic nonchalance: " It is a kind of bas-relief on foot, affirms the gallerist Kamel Mennour at the microphone of RFI, composed of sheets of cars on which he sublimated images of a certain disinherited and devalued youth of Philadelphia that he rubbed shoulders for seven months. "

Set the Fiac on fire

What about the fire-red stand of the Gmurzynska Gallery turned into a fire station housing both hundreds of engraved fire extinguishers and paintings by Yves Klein, Otto Piene, Joan Miro and Karl Lagerfeld? A total work by the designer and scenographer Alexander de Betak: " We made a choice in the Gmurzynska gallery's collection of modern art to find works made with fire or inspired by fire. I wanted to make an environment both inspired by firefighters and barracks, boyish dreams to showcase these works. And at the same time a very pop installation to set fire to Fiac ... [laughs] »

César (detail) (2018), installation-sculpture by the French artist of Algerian origin Mohamed Bourouissa. Siegfried Forster / RFI

► FIAC, from October 18 to 21, at the Grand Palais, Paris.