NEW HORIZONS gathers the work of a group of French artists who, over the last few years, began to excel in the international art scene. The exhibition, shown in Vigo after having been exhibited at CRAC Alsace and La Central Electrique, Brussels, is structured into several topics, which glimpse a leitmotif, a common concern of the artists on their social and political context. Born all of them in France, they have been developing their artistic activity over the last twenty years, and now tackle the most burning issues of the social, political and cultural French scene.
The curator's selection intentionally gathers much of those artists - lesser-known abroad -, together with others better known in the international scene, in order to give the public a panorama, as complete as possible, of the present French artistic scene
The layout and the installation of the works in the galleries at MARCO are intended, on the one hand, to give evidence of the differences, strengthening the individual characteristic of each work, emphasising some links and groups among the works themselves at the same time, both in relation to their content or to the topics they tackle, the medium they use, and their relation and communication to the viewer.
In the midst of this diversity, analysis of contents permits a classification in various thematic axes, at the same time interconnected according to each artist's intention and their presence in the galleries: works with religion as their leitmotif - Clarisse Hahn's portraits of a community and the matter of identity in Valérie Mréjen's videos - are mixed with the analysis of the social-political context - contemporary critics and articles on the capitalist world in Bruno Serralongue's and Vincent Labaumes's works; Alain Declerq's terrorist plots and collective paranoid - and also mixes with the peculiar interpretations of sexuality and violence in Philippe Meste's installation or in Brice Dellsperger's transgressor ambiguity.
Corinne Marchetti's, Katia Bourdarel's, Amandine Sacquin's, or Virginie Barré's relationship with the world of childhood, the cinema and the comic, contrast with the sharp and ironic view of the contemporary society Bruno Peinado's or Patrick Jeannes' works, as well as in Fabien Rigobert's photograph. Thinking on the moving image and its interaction with the public - both by means of the tv, the video and the new technologies - is well represented in Julien Discrit's visual and sound installation at the central panoptical, in Laurent Grasso's virtual eclipse virtual, in Martin Le Chevallier's interactive video or in Elodie Huet's video-installation, which request public interaction to be completely understood. All these works tell us about the relationship between time and space, and its capability of communication with the viewer.
Acting as the starting and the ending point of the exhibition, and as the image that illustrates the cover of this group exhibition catalogue, a photograph of the Atlantic beach of La Baule, a work by Frank Perrin, welcomes and waves the visitors from the museum's façade.
