When contemporary art flows from Source!

Guided tour, between collections and ephemeral exhibition of Léon-Dierx which, for the occasion, are in perfect osmosis, in the company of the master of the place, Bernard Leveneur and one of the two curators of "Behind the light...", Nathalie Gonthier, who worked here with Valentine Umansky, "curator" of London's Tate Modern. An exhibition which results from a triple residency of creation and heritage which benefited, this year, Thierry Fontaine, Tieri Rivière and Abel Técher. A godsend for each of them, even if they were already armed for a long time to do battle with such picture rails in their profession of high-level visual artist, like the first city, and in particular in this museum. The opportunity for them to spend six months of research in the best conditions within the collections to each engage in dialogue with an artist of their choice such as Auguste Leroy (1832-1892) and his landscapes, for Fontaine, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and his drawings and engraving "Paul et Virginie" for Técher, and Arthur Grimaud's invoice or even the drawings by Georges Rouault illustrating the "Réincarnations du Père Ubu", for Rivière. "Behind the light, from the Enlightenment, is a memory transmitted, projected and imagined by artists and writers", indicates Leveneur. "The project of a Museum of Fine Arts within a formerly colonial territory, because of its initial ambition of education and the construction of a memory, continues to contribute even today by its development and its encounter with contemporary creation to write the constitutive narrative of a Creole and current cultural identity."

From the outset, the tone is set by the installation of one of these huts in which Tieri Rivière deploys, exhibition after exhibition, the idea of ​​fragility in a construction in…imbalance, and which he has this time produced as a mirror for that the works on the picture rails find a reflection there; a form of "sculpture-action", indicates Nathalie Gonthier, appreciating that "the visual artist, who creates spaces to experience, in which his own body will serve as a standard of measurement, in his theme of Creole construction, by the choice of materials, models, architectural features or decorative forms, strives to reveal a specific cultural identity of the territory it claims. The Creole habitat, its initial structuring, its motifs, leading him to create sculptures whose stylization of forms mixes decoration and staging. "Or how to experience art in a place that shows art?" We discover further on other proposals where, in particular, Tieri Rivière plays on the staging of the absurd to decline in its own way this proposal that "behind the light" is nested "the memory" of History .

CONVERSATIONS IN CREATION. It is with the romantic approach of the country landscapes painted by Leroy that Thierry Fontaine has chosen, for his part, to confront himself. "He questions the limits of nature, questions the territory and poses this relationship between the interior and the exterior", specifies "the" Fontaine specialist who is Commissioner Gonthier. Who adds: "For the landscape to be born, it must be defined as the meeting place between nature and culture. So, Thierry photographs the absence of humanity, its still perceptible traces through his staging of dreams awakened. To whom belonged these bodies restored in the form of ancient vestiges? What were the beliefs of his men and women? The clues he transmits to us, statuary, masks, jewels, rituals, take shape within this idealized nature and sentimental painting painted at the end of the 19th century by Adolphe Leroy and takes us on a fictional reading of history." Everything is said and appreciated in situ in front of striking works such as the "Souffles" and other masks from a series "Contacts", here unpublished, including an impressive installation, always inspired by Leroy, between sources of fluctuating images such as the flow of a stream, and sculptural realities of stone or glass pebbles with sound accompaniment from which filter the songs of water and birds, all accompanied by this alchemy of candles adding the idea of ​​spirituality and its practices on the altars of creoleness.

As for Abel Técher, it was with the illustrations of "Paul et Virginie", the island epic written by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre (1737-1814), that he found his material to create, choosing to immortalize the drawings on wallpaper, in all the dimensions within reach in this museum. "The characters, the landscape, nature, transformed into graphic motifs bring back to a gesture of construction of the decor of a story imagined to make exist in Western thought an ideal and exotic elsewhere", indicates Bernard Leveneur, specifying that "the artist has chosen the current transposition of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's intention to produce the fictitious representation of a distant island foreign to the Old Continent, a virgin space that moralizing civilization has not yet perverted with regard to a museum whose origin is justified by the emancipatory ambition of Creole intellectuals."

An exhibition that establishes better than ever the position of an "Art Pole" in the Department, to mark a break with traditional historical and museum sites and add to them a contemporary reflection in the light of today's creation, a link between past and present, with a strong departmental desire to support creative actions in general. And with the Frac in particular, as evidenced by the collective exhibition "Mutual Core", at the Artothèque. Following the next number !

Marine Dusigne

"Behind the light, rediscovered memory", exhibition to be seen until April 3, 2022 at the Léon-Dierx museum, 28 rue de Paris, Saint-Denis.

A catalog is planned to immortalize this event exhibition, to be discovered at the beginning of the year.

>Leon-Dierx?

The so-called Museum of Fine Arts of La Réunion, with major collections of paintings, prints, graphic arts, photographs and sculptures, was created in the colonial context supposed to welcome European modernity at the end of the 19th century. like the artistic past of this island. Hence the duality that continues since the 20th century and more than ever today to impose itself between contemporary creation and Reunion heritage, for the enrichment of its funds and its policy of exhibitions. The decade that preceded the new millennium saw contemporary art valued in this department and, for four years, the so-called Heritage and Creation residences of the Department already stimulated around forty visual artists welcomed between its various museums, archives and departmental library. No less than seven took place at the Léon-Dierx Museum, inviting artists to create in connection with the collections. This year benefited three of them, Thierry Fontaine, Tiéri Rivière and Abel Técher. Artists whose works have already circulated in this museum which they know well to the point of wishing to bring their contemporary style to dialogue with the collections chosen by each

> Female Commissioners

Valentine Umansky, born in France in 1989, independent curator, author and critic, has worked for several years with institutions specializing in the visual arts. Collaboration for two years at the Rencontres d'Arles then at the Galerie des Filles du Calvaire in Paris, of which Thierry Fontaine is one of the artists exhibited) she left France for the United States in 2016. Author of "Duane Michals, Le Storyteller" at Filigranes Editions she is preparing a new book on the word of protest, collaborating with many artists for and on whom she writes (Mike Brodie, Catherine Poncin, Frédéric Nauczyciel, Sylvie Blocher, Laurent Fiévet, Matt Wilson). Since 2018, regularly organizes exhibitions in Labanque, Béthune, became co-curator of the Lagos Photo Festival in Nigeria, was curative until 2020 at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati before joining the Tate Modern team, in London, as Curator of International Art, in charge of "moving images", video art and cinema.

Nathalie Gonthier, born in Madagascar in 1967, originally from Réunion, trained in art and cultural mediation in contemporary art in Paris (University of Paris I and Paris VIII). Independent exhibition curator and teacher, currently in charge of the programming and implementation of exhibitions and visual arts residencies at the Cité des Arts after having been for five years the head of visual arts at the culture department of Saint-Denis, then assumed the direction of the FRAC in Reunion and endorsed the mission of curator for the Indian Ocean, South and Southern Africa of the Biennial of the image PHOTOQUAI organized by the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Since 2015, he is credited with having developed exhibition cycles such as "L'Envers de l'île" and "La Part de l'autre" and directed, at the Cité, photographic residencies "Le Grand Chemin". Mentor of artists like Laura Henno, Myriam Mihindou, Malala Andrialazidrazana and Thierry Fontaine for years, she became in 2017 associate curator of the Bamako Encounters, the African Photography Biennale. Advisor since 2018 for the visual arts within the Council for Culture, Education and the Environment (CCEE) of Reunion, she was approached in 2020, to sit in Paris at the College Photography and animated images of the Center National School of Plastic Arts (CNAP) .

>Artists in residence

Thierry Fontaine, the eldest in age and notoriety, has been wearing for years, loud and clear, in photos and statuary, the colors of his Creole identity all over the world. An artist whose name remains forever linked to the Villa Medici where he was the only representative, so far, of Reunion. The CV of this Saint-Pierrois is dense and eloquent. Graduated from the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg in 1992, resident of the Villa Medici in 1999 in Rome, he proposed the year after his exhibition "The Savages" at Léon-Dierx. In 2003, it was the picture rails of the Museum of Modern Art, then those of the Palais de Tokyo, two years later, which hosted his works. In 2007, he headed to Australia and the Raw Space Gallery in Brisbane, where he exhibited work that obviously appealed for its originality, before being welcomed at the Studio Museum in Harlem and seeing his sculptural photos light up Biennials. which count as those of Lyon in 2009, then that of Photo España in 2011 ("The Power of Doutbt"). In 2012, he was featured in the collective exhibition "Vivement Demain!" at the Val de Marne Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2015, winner of the Carte blanche PMU, he took the opportunity to show his Expo "The Players" at the Center George-Pompidou. Installations will follow at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, at the FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur in Marseille, at La Terrasse, Center d'Art Contemporain de Nanterre, at the Center Photographique d'Île-de-France and, with us, a double exhibition between Cité des Arts and Frac, after having invested the Galerie du Téat Champ Fleuri. Represented by La Galerie des Filles du Calvaire in Paris, his work is always situated at the intersection of sculpture, his primary medium, and photography with subjects rooted in reality and nourished by his poetry.

Tieri Rivière, also born in the south of Reunion, graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier and the Haute École des Arts du Rhin, he has been teaching volume at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art de La Réunion since 2018. His works were presented at the Salon de Montrouge in 2012, in Paris, at the Galerie Maubert and at Pontault-Combault for the Young Creators of the City award. Returning to the country in 2014, he participated in group exhibitions at Téat Champ-Fleuri and also at the Léon Dierx Museum ("l'Envers de l'île") and in the month of contemporary art in the city of Le Tampon. Since 2015, he has been involved in the Run Space project entitled La BOX, which he initiated with Yohann Quëland from Saint-Pern, Myriam Omar Awadi and Anne Fontaine. In 2018, La BOX exhibited its collaborative project at La Cité des arts. Through his drawings, sculptures and videos where the absurd and the burlesque can mingle, he offers a reinterpretation of reality. His body becomes a tool to be activated. As Nathalie Gonthier, who hosted him at Fanal, confides, "A scale that locates a setting, makes it exist, even through the disappearance of this body. Whether in his sculptures or in his videos, everything depends on a thread. Challenge to gravity, tension, risk, balance of power, balance, movement, all these questions that appear pose fundamental questions to the sculpture. How to hold or make it stand? Should we laugh or cry?

Abel Técher, born in 1992 in Saint-Pierre, also studied at the Ecole Supérieure d'Art de la Réunion (DNSEP) in 2015 and lives and works in Réunion. From 2015, he began to present his works, notably within "L'Envers de l'île" between the Léon Dierx Museum, the Ecole Supérieure d'Art and the Cité des Arts. In 2016, he directed "Fais semblant!" a personal exhibition in the print room of the Dionysian Museum of Fine Arts and participates in collective exhibitions at the Frac Réunion "Where to put your head?", at the Le Transpalette Art Center in Bourges "Traversées Foxes", then in Paris, Brussels and Berlin. He has been represented for four years in Paris by the Maelle Galerie. From the outset he chose a multidisciplinary practice (painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, video and installation) focusing on questioning the notions of identity and gender. The treatment of the body, the limits and the relationship of domination reveals a personal and intimate story. His purpose? "To be and to represent himself, to create his own avatars", issues with which he plays with subtlety and distance", confides Commissioner Gonthier.