Carré d'Art

Carré d’Art – Museum of Contemporary Art is dedicating a major exhibition to Ida Tursic & Wilfried Mille, whose collaborative practice, developed over more than twenty years, directly questions the conditions of painting’s existence in a world saturated with images. Their work seeks neither to preserve the medium nor to assert its purity, but rather to expose it to excess, collision, and dissonance. Drawing on a wide range of iconographic registers, including landscape, portraiture, still life, abstraction, advertising imagery, and scholarly references, the artists compose paintings traversed by multiple layers, interruptions, accidents, and parasitic gestures. The images are taken, moved, superimposed, sometimes altered to the point of near disappearance, producing constant tensions between figuration and abstraction, recognition and loss of reference points. This logic of dissonance, which is always variable, runs through the entire exhibition, immersing us in the intimacy of the artists’ studios and in an empirical practice where painting functions as a system whose rules are constantly shifting. Styles contaminate each other, emotions shift, motifs circulate from one work to another. Sentimental scenes borrowed from post-war imagery, landscapes riddled with latent catastrophes, floral motifs, abstract gestures, and pictorial fragments coexist in a deliberately unstable proximity. Painting, omnipresent, acts as a critical tool, humorously questioning a certain established order, the hierarchy of tastes, and the seductive power of images.

Vivian Suter travaille quotidiennement dans son jardin de Panajachel au Guatemala, où elle vit depuis les années 1980. Elle intègre dans sa peinture des facteurs externes tels que l’humidité, la lumière, la flore et la faune constituant ainsi une documentation de son environnement de vie. Les forces et les textures de la luxuriante nature subtropicale guatémaltèque sont enregistrées dans la peinture gestuelle et colorée de l’artiste. Les œuvres, qui ne portent pas de titre ni date, peuvent ensuite s’accrocher dans tous les sens au sein d’installations proliférantes. Les visiteurs et visiteuses traversent littéralement la peinture de Vivian Suter jusqu’à plonger physiquement dans une œuvre dense dont l’atmosphère est composée de formes, de couleurs et de traces laissées par les intempéries.