JULIAN FARADE
"Beautés"
Group show
The exhibition presents a selection of the FRAC Auvergne's acquisitions between 1985 and 2023 on the theme of "beauties".
Marcel Proust wrote that "true beauty is so particular, so new, that one does not recognize it for beauty", underlining our impotence to know how to seize it when it presents itself, surprised to see it revealed with delay, afterwards. Beauty is a friction of contradictory feelings. The emotion, the wonder, the poetry and the lightness rub shoulders with the disgrace, the perishable, the melancholic and the gravity. What appeared to be devoid of beauty reveals itself in an unexpected bloom, more subtle than the meaning attributed to this quality often confused with prettiness. Beauty reveals itself, opaque and nostalgic like a drop of black ink in milk, solar like a glittering reflection on the surface of water, unfixable like the scrolling of a landscape seen through the window of a train speeding through the countryside. The beauties are bright as well as fading. Without doubt the weakening light of the twilight flush with the darkness is more appropriate to qualify the beauty and its ineluctable fanatical: the vesperal sunset is as much the spectacle of the romantic bluettes as the staggering blaze announcing an extinction.
Acquired by the collection of the FRAC Auvergne between 1985 and 2023, the "beauties" gathered in this exhibition were born of the "caprices" of those who created them. By caprice, we mean the impulse, the fantasy, the generosity and the profusion, we must feel the thrill (capriccio in Italian) with which they gratified the artists who imagined them long before they were given to us. Not one beauty but many beauties, associating their opposites in an indissoluble embrace. The harmonious joins the discordance, the magnificence welcomes the stridence, the lustre accepts the stinging folds and the fascinating disintegrations. The swirls of a group of carp on the surface of a pond, framed by Rinko Kawauchi, offer a beauty already threatened by the shivering of a stained glass fragility; the dawn light of Claire Chesnier's inks brings to the surface the original peat at the same time as the muddy becoming of the world; Gregory Crewdson's perfect composition reveals its harmony in the measure of the loneliness of the beings who are frozen in a grace, in spite of themselves.
Jean-Charles Vergne
Director of the FRAC Auvergne
Curator of the exhibition
With the artworks of Ahmadi Ghotbi, Aillaud, Braeckman, Chesnier, Crewdson, D'Hollander, Dijkstra, Dulom, Durand, Eriksson, Eustache, Julian Farade, Flexner, Fourniau, Gadonneix, Gelzer, Geoffray, Gorchov, Graves, Herbelin, Hoffmann, Jones, Kawauchi, Laget, Maris, Mauger, Tania Mouraud, Oehlen, Paul, Pétrel, Raffael, Rheingantz, Roche, Safa, Saint-Jacques, Sanchez, Stella, Vicerial, Vyakul
FRAC Auvergne
6 rue du Terrail
63000 Clermont-Ferrand, France
Opening hours :
Tuesday to Saturday from 14 p.m to18 p.m
On Sunday from 15 p.m to 18 p.m
Free exhibition