Catalogue de l'exposition Collective JEUNES PLASTICIENS DE GUADELOUPE

How will our Guadeloupean culture so entrenched in an ambivalence found nowhere else, resembling a transfer periodically worn away by upheavals replete with ‘noise and fury’, respond to the conceptual tools of contemporary art? Or invent them? And as for the artists themselves, how will they come to develop their practice and produce art? And in the fault, at once infinite and infinitely fine, that lies within this ambivalence, what will they find? In the works presented at the Clément Foundation by these six visual artists, the media and the techniques employed are no different from those typically found in modern or contemporary artistic practice. But clearly the intention to use paint as the form of expression is prolific. Their acrylic paintings engender complexity, strangeness, power, singularity and beauty. And yet they are bereft of nostalgia, complaint, supplication, wailing. They simply exude an aura of metaphysical anxiety (in the Giacometti sense). That is to say the aura of a vibrant and powerful presence in its essence, one which asks questions.

Michel Rovélas