Angélique⎜Stéphane Belzère⎜Marcos Carrasquer⎜Philippe Hortala⎜Martinet & Texereau⎜Leticia Martínez Pérez⎜Raphaël-Bachir Osman⎜Till Rabus⎜Raphaëlle Ricol⎜Marcos Uriondo⎜Davor Vrankić
The exhibition gathers artworks centered on the motif of food, revisiting the delightful tradition of still-life painting from a contemporary perspective. Spanning diverse worlds and media - drawing, sculpture, painting - the selected works all question the ambiguous spirit of a saturated age whose voracious mood oscillates between attraction and disgust. With more or less biting wit, they cast a critical eye on our consumerist and capitalist society that favors possession and compulsion: tidal wave of useless products and collective neuroses masking a deeper existential dizziness, where individuals lose themselves in the feverish pursuit of vacuum desires. Through tight framing and the proliferation and saturation of food motifs - sweets, addictive treats, packaging - the works embody an alluring vision of appetizing colors but set against dark backgrounds, leaving a more acidic aftertaste. Ambiguous, an appetizing form can suddenly become threatening; a piece of vacuum or canned meat can take on an unsettling anthropomorphic resonance.
Between fascination and repulsion, the works examine our intimate relationship with consumption but also reveal, for some of them, the violence of the political and collective corps - cutting satire of an era of extremists hungry for domination, productivism and predation. Food is a warfare. Yet the critique is often ambivalent; what repels also fascinates. Sometimes, the beauty of the line and the attraction of color draws us back to the appeal of the industrial world and its sophisticated packaging. Sometimes, they evoke the taste of family meals prepared by our grandmothers, bringing to the surface the memory of the passé imagery of old cookbooks. Food can also be about sharing and the wish of bringing people together. By extension, the artwork becomes a metaphor for the desire to paint and for the experimentation within the studio. Painting - lovingly tactile - clumps together and spreads out, hungry for forms, colors and textures.
Through a generous display, the Hungry Mood show sets the desire to paint as a defiant response to the spirit of the times - between seduction and repulsion, gluttony and anger.
Amélie Adamo
