Futur, ancien, fugitif

To tell the story of today, to tell the story of an elusive present: this exhibition is perhaps impossible to tackle this task. The title, borrowed from Olivier Cadiot, summons the present in all its fleeting nature and in all the test of its prescriptability. It evokes a mood of the time, as well as a metaphor for creation. With these three words put end to end, it is the present that arises, without ever being written. Made of accelerations and flashes, this exhibition jumps from one genre to another to draw up a sensitive cartography of an era. The informal community of artists that she presents uses a very wide range of practices, as so many ways to make the present emerge in the dark. This exhibition does not present a panorama of contemporary creation in France: it reinvents a territory slightly different from the one we know.

The exhibition Future, ancient, fugitive, dedicated to” one Scène française” is based on an open concept of territorial registration — which brings together artists born in France or abroad, living in France or abroad, temporarily or permanently linked to this country — as much as it escapes the effects of Tabula Rasa who would like one generation to eclipse another. On the contrary, it brings together “contemporaries” who today share this evolving space with porous borders. And seeks to draw the transmission belts through which transits this zeitgeist that the forty-four artists or artist groups gathered for the occasion simultaneously breathe. Artists born between the 1930s and the 1990s, but who all live and work, in and with their time.

Contemporary is a “transitive and therefore relational word”, recalled Lionel Ruffel in Hustle and bustle. The worlds of the contemporary. We are contemporary of Something or of someone and it is this interdependence, this link that allows us to build bridges from one artist to another in the exhibition that we have built in all the spaces of the Palais de Tokyo. It is again this permeability to the present and a form of permanence to time that we thought we detected in the artists gathered in the exhibition and that allowed us to establish this photograph that is not exhaustive, or even representative, but simply sensitive, but simply sensitive, of a French scene. Or rather from an “other” French scene. One that is created more discreetly but with no less power in workshops, art schools, shared spaces, on the margins or sheltered from the market.

The invited artists thus share the ability to oppose forms of resistance to assignments and other fashion effects that irretrievably taint an era. Not that these artists are staying away from today's world, on the contrary, on the contrary, let's say that refusing urgency, they let the thickness of time seep into their works.

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