In Dijon, the exhibition "Marc Desgrandchamps

2023-06-17 16:21:41

Under an implacable blue sky, two severed heads, one of a horse and the other of a cow, stand up, each stuck on a stake, in a meadow stained with shards of flesh and blood. These two macabre totems were painted in 1995 by Marc Desgrandchamps “echoing, he said, on the return from the war in Europe, in the Balkans where peoples, who lived in good harmony, began to massacre each other”. Entitled Les Effigies, this large diptych – acquired by the Center Pompidou – is hung at the opening of the exhibition that the Museum of Fine Arts in Dijon is devoting to the artist until the end of the summer. As an allusion to this other war that is ravaging Ukraine today…

An uninformed visitor could only see in this painting an image taken from a western, where the skulls of cattle are erected at the entrance to the ranches. Another emblem of human savagery, in short. Sprinkled with nods to cinema or literature, Marc Desgrandchamps’ painting likes to cultivate ambiguity, far from a unambiguous message. And if the tensions of the news sometimes surface in his paintings, it is always in an extremely discreet way…

An apparent carelessness

Among the fifty or so of his recent works brought together in Dijon, most offer, at first glance, an apparent carelessness. Dominated by a Mediterranean blue nuanced with sand or soft green, these are scenes of the beach, of free horses, of robust vacationers in bathing suits. Some take selfies with their cell phones or take holiday photos. A motif that has appeared in the work over the past ten years. The artist works mainly from press images or his own shots, which he freely reinterprets.

A few minor details, however, disturb the deceptive calm of these paintings. Here, in the background, there are small black silhouettes struggling not far from a creek, while an indifferent woman on a bicycle appears in front of the canvas. Further away, A crossing (2022) shows us, seen from the air, the coasts of the island of Elba and Italy, with tiny boats on the sea, while appear suspended in the air, as in a mystical vision, the planks of wood and the ropes of a boat. This Crossinglooking like a last voyage, could it be an allusion to the death of thousands of migrants, drowned in the Mediterranean?

In another canvas, a statue of The modest Aphrodite Greek, trying to pull up her dress to hide her sex, meets two black silhouettes of women in chadors and without hands, in a striking temporal telescoping. Several other paintings thus link contemporary figures – most often female – to famous antiques, partly broken, or to ruins. As if the artist were haunted by nostalgia for a lost paradise.

Picking up scraps of memories

The very title of one of his paintings, “A Peacetime Morning”is thus borrowed from the film The Pier by Chris Marker whose hero, a prisoner during the war and plunged back into the happy times of his childhood, suddenly measures the immensity of all that has disappeared. A few steps further, a large diptych shows us a deserted beach on which a sudden gust of wind has overturned plastic chairs, next to the toys of an absent child.

With stubbornness, Marc Desgrandchamps nevertheless tries to save a few scraps, to pick up fragments, to record the fleeting traces of this vanished harmony. In his painting, the figures often appear fragmented, or mixed in games of ghostly superimpositions, as in the depths of memory. See this Uncertain Centaur where, against the backdrop of a majestic landscape of hills, framed by two electricity pylons, the legs of a horse mingle with those of a woman and the face of a contemporary smiley…