Contemporary French Art 2: Gerard Garouste, Colette Deble, Georges Rousse, Genevieve Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joel Kermarrec, Daniele Pe (Electronic book text)

Gerard Garouste, Colette Deble, Georges Rousse, Genevieve Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joel Kermarrec, Daniele Perronne, Daniel Dezeuze, Philippe Favier, Daniel Nadaud: after the eleven essays of "Contemporary French Art 1," devoted to major artists from Ben Vautier and Niki de Saint Phalle to Annette Messager and Gerard Titus-Carmel, the present volume pursues its interrogations of the "what," the "how "and the "why "of contemporary plastic production of some of Frances finest practitioners. If, as ever, such production can reveal elements of an interweaving of individualized preoccupations and modes, endless specificities demarcate and affirm originalities that pure theory and its leveling anonymity may obscure. Thus is it that Gerard Garouste is alone in that obsession with indianness and classicalness, that Colette Debles gesture is drawn implacably to the unseenness of female representation, that Georges Rousse plunges photography into the realm of matters poetic sacredness, that Genevieve Asse traverses a pure seemingness of abstraction to attain to an intimacy of silence, that Martial Raysses hygiene of vision may endlessly renew and hybridize itself. Christian Jaccard, too, will explore with uniqueness an art of materiality at the frontier of metaphysics, Joel Kermarrec will offer us the inimitable exquisite traces of surging desire and deception, Daniele Perronnes boxes and stringings, her paintings and her sheetings will unfold a psychic infinity at the heart of form. And, if Daniel Dezeuze seeks namelessness and pure structuration, the latter yet surge forth via works that relentlessly identify a gesture so distant, we may feel, from the at once sobering and ceremonial microproliferations of a Philippe Favier or the tense but genial articulations of Daniel Nadauds sculptural imagination."