2023-06-29 19:17:08
► “Untitled”, 2006, by Guillaume Bresson, the riot as a subject of history painting
Born in 1982 in Rangueil, in the suburbs of Toulouse, Guillaume Bresson began by doing graffiti as a teenager before entering the National School of Fine Arts in Paris. This urban riot scene, painted while he was still a student, contributed with other canvases on the same theme or on fights between gangs to his rapid recognition just after his graduation in 2007. Represented today by the Nathalie Obadia gallery, he now lives in New York.
Here, the young artist is inspired by the revolts that occurred in the suburbs in 2005, and in particular in Toulouse. Despite its hyperrealistic treatment, the scene is nothing like a photographic snapshot. Guillaume Bresson prepares his compositions with drawn sketches, before posing different models that he photographs. This recomposition, this almost choreographic staging, allows him to put his subject at a distance.
The painting is painted in oil in grisaille, without colors, to better focus our gaze on the ballet of the protagonists. Trained in sculpture and molding in the studio of Jean-François Duffau at the Beaux-Arts, the artist is indeed very attentive to the attitudes of the bodies, to the violence, to the energy or the compassion they express ( see the boy supporting a young girl in the foreground).
One may also be tempted to unearth a few quotations from famous works in this scene. Thus the masked thrower in the center of the painting who is about to throw a Molotov cocktail (?) refers to a stencil mural by Banksy, The Flower Thrower, showing in 2003, in the West Bank, a young man, also masked and preparing, in the same attitude, to throw a bouquet of flowers.
As for the large flag waving in the background, it seems borrowed from Liberty Leading the People of Delacroix, even if he lost his three revolutionary colors. Which would resolutely place this historical picture on the side of politics, far from a simple news item.
► “Lost ball” by Vova, with Dipro, Lelbi, Méro, the rap of blocked horizons
In 2018, four young urban music artists join forces to perform Lost bullet. Coming from hip-hop, and street art or graffiti, slammers and DJs, Vova, Dipro, Lelbi and Méro claim a “No Future” rap. Accustomed to collectives via previous associations, Vis Paris, Diverset and Trois cinq six, these artists from the Paris region follow one another at the microphone of a river piece stretched by anger and expectation of the future.
« The little one took a bullet yeah / He didn’t ask for anything / The cops probe him, it’s hot when it’s filthy / The relatives of the victim regret their life of peace / A life of projects without problems, very close to the life you love”.
Vova, Dipro, Lelbi and Méro denounce blocked horizons, the impossible future. “There is no overconfidence and that from the beginning, shout the rappers. My future is in me, I only have it in my idea / How to take control of your destiny when you’re handcuffed? / I just want to get away they talk to me about hit and run”.
A glimmer of hope emerges at the end at the evocation of the “brothers” and relatives who “shoulder”. Since then, Vova has led artistic workshops with college and high school students from the Versailles Academy and led a rap writing project in an IUT at the University of Cergy-Pontoise.
► “Les Miserables” by Ladj Ly, in the heart of the suburban volcano
Coming from the documentary, Ladj Ly has always filmed what he saw, what he saw. Surrounded by a collective, he had already made a short film: 365 Days in Clichy-Montfermeilfilmed after the riots of 2005, is both the outline and the matrix of this feature film which so strongly impressed the 2019 Cannes Film Festival that it walked away with the Grand Jury Prize.
A young cop from Cherbourg, Pento took up his post at the BAC (renamed the “anti-cam brigade”) in Montfermeil (Seine-Saint-Denis). Like the spectator, he discovers a reality for which he is not prepared. His two colleagues, Chris, a sheriff quickly overwhelmed by his excesses, and Gwada, more moderate, pay him a long commented visit, cynical and earthy, with the false relaxation of blasé perpetually on the alert. By dint of patrolling the same quadrilateral, they know every corner of this powder keg.
The violence of the repartees, which translates complicity and roughness of the relations, is tempered by a sharp humor, often burlesque situations, with dialogues where the words snap, in a register of well shaken language which does not lack poetry. But looks are weapons. The spark of the explosion springs from an incident whose ridiculousness as violence is superbly staged.
Ladj Ly never pays into bias or judgment. He plunges into the complexity of this volcano. There are neither the good nor the bad, but humans – the miserable – trapped.
► “There are men who will always get lost”, by Rebecca Lighieri
This book, published in 2020, is a punch. We had to expect it – we could hope for it – coming from Rebecca Lighieri, the pseudonym by which the novelist Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam signs her noir novels. Here, the destiny shattered in advance of a family from the northern districts of Marseille, from the 1990s to the 2000s, devastated by paternal madness. An uppercut than this social tragedy where death, passion and hatred mingle. And violence.
Blows, and insults, the narrator Karel Claeys received, a young man of incredible beauty, first child of the Kabyle Loubna and the Belgian Karl. His younger sister suffered too, his little brother, especially. Mohand, a child martyr born with several malformations and subjected to the pathological love of his mother and the destructive rage of his father, to which nothing, and no one, opposes.
“The only thing that lasts forever is childhood, when it went wrong” : throughout this interminable night that the existence of the three young adults has been until then, fear fades and hatred remains, an inextinguishable bond of blood that unites the siblings.
It’s raw, it’s cruel and, far from any pathos, the carnal writing of Rebecca Lighieri exudes body language. Their beauty, their stigmata, their suffering and their lack. We throb with them, reflections of bruised souls, closer to their gestures and Karel’s thoughts with, in our ears, the rap of IAM, the soul of Marvin Gay and the words of love of “Khaled, by Cheb Hasni, by Mike Brant, by Celine Dion, by Johnny – those songs that we all listened to in the city, without knowing anything about it and without understanding anything about it, love having never been within our means”.
#works #fueled #anger #suburbs