Marseille (AFP)
How do travel influence artistic creation? An exhibition at the Mucem in Marseille shows that they are leading painters including Henri Matisse or Wassily Kandinsky to reinvent their art and contemporary visual artists to question the state of the world by exploring wandering and exile.
The journey is first of all the suitcase, as well the "Box in suitcase" by Marcel Duchamp - which contains reproductions of his works - as the installation of old empty suitcases hanging on long red threads of the Japanese artist Chiaru Shiota.
"Where do we come from, where are we going? The suitcases ask us about our memories", remarks Christine Poullain, co-curator of this exhibition whose title refers to a planetary tube sung by Desireless in 1986 and written by Jean-Michel Rivat.
The trip is then the means of transport. The plane like this caravel whose cockpit was diverted into an object of art by the Marseilles artist Richard Baquié (1952-1996), figure of conceptual art.
Still a means of transport like the famous car compressions of the Marseille sculptor César, two of which are on display.
Through the hundred works - paintings, sculptures, installations, drawings, photographs, videos from public or private collections - gathered at the Marseille museum on the Mediterranean coast, it is a question of showing "how travel overturns artistic vision ", underlines the president of Mucem, Jean-François Chougnet.
- "Polynesia, the sea, Polynesia the sky" -
After Italy from the 16th century, North Africa attracted European artists at the start of the 20th century. "And the journey becomes an artistic gesture," comments Christine Poullain.
There are the paintings of very famous "traveling painters" such as those of Henri Matisse in Tangier, Albert Marquet in Algiers, or Paul Klee and Kandinsky who "discovered in Tunisia the path to abstraction. erase, forms arise alone ", notes Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff, co-curator of the exhibition.
These trips, "have led artists to invent a new conception of art, a different vision of the world, to explore all possible techniques and to transform the artistic landscape," says Christine Poullain.
In front of these paintings by western artists influenced by Mediterranean light and architecture, are exposed the works of contemporary African artists and their vision of departure, or the impossibility "of departure, towards" the other shore ". The journey becomes migration, exile as imagined by the Congolese artist Barthélémy Toguo and his installation "Road to exile", that of a fragile skiff, overloaded with bundles made of colorful African fabrics, sailing on a sea of glass bottles .
"Hot Spot" by artist Mona Hatoum also translates a pessimistic vision of the state of the world. Made of neon and steel tubes, a hemisphere crossed by bright red bands shows, for the commissioners, "the mobility of the world and migratory phenomena".
Travel is also a preferred theme for photography. In contrast to those, in black and white, of the Frenchman Bernard Plossu anxious, he says, to go "where the road stops" in the countries crossed, the British Martin Parr is interested as for him tourism mass and its essential accessory, the selfie.
Whether you are in Venice, Cuba in India or in front of the Mona Lisa, the place visited is no longer an object of contemplation but reduced to the function of wallpaper for instant portraits taken on a mobile phone and intended for social networks.
The exhibition ends with two large tapestries, facing each other, by Henri Matisse. "Polynesia the sea", and "Polynesia the sky", both very similar, in blue and white, but created separately more than 15 years after a trip to the archipelago and brought together for the first time.
"Voyage, voyages" from January 22 to May 4 at MuCem, in Marseille.
© 2020 AFP