La Vie en Rose de Anne Lise Coste /Tu m’Accompagneras à la plage de Valentine Schlegel
22/06-29/09/19 CRAC Sète
As the Summer draws to a close, I visited Sète’s CRAC which has a double entry. One by way of Anne Lise Coste’s painting project La Vie en Rose and the other by way of a Valentine Schlegel retrospective which recasts these objets de déco and these props as an artistic adventure.
I had the misfortune to go left and find myself dragged through a faux naïve reappropriation of painting in it’s forms and critical thinking in the form of instagram comments placed with hope of attracting followers. So what is it that makes me so dismissive of this work, is it the dishonesty? the political correctness? the technique or lack of? Well lets do some Anne Lise, pardon my French.
First room is decorated with a childish scrawls that are possibly a literal translation of the neon sharpie maquette made on the inside of an empty kebab box at 3h in the morning. These artist never sleep, always working. Between scrawls there is just enough information on Felipe Gomez Alonzo, to elude to Trumps desire to build a wall, dehumanise Latin American migrants and failure of America as the land of dreams. Luckily I can read English, unluckily, I don’t appreciate the cultural appropriation of foreign narratives in order to remind us of the migrant crisis while we pat ourselves on the back for being aware of what is happening in the colonies (the USA, you know what I mean) while simultaneously shaking our heads how cruel this other version of us is with the real other. What’s wrong with Flight to Egypt as a metaphor for our current reflection on migration. At least that would be both shocking and amusant, possibly creating the dialogue that social media defends, while it floods us with information and reduces our reactions to a heart.
Maybe I didn’t get the joke. The Berlin Wall, the west bank, the Peace Walls in Northern Ireland have at least given us some decent graffiti. They have attempted to engage with the public by communicating messages in an aesthetic manner with which people identify. Anne Lise Coste lacks the virtuosity that all the greats from New York to Amsterdam by way of Toulouse have shown us. She lacks the daring and the volume of pixodors and the install lacks the ampler of Katherina Grosse. There are also two benches in the room but they’re on the other wall and they will not interfere with the scrawls.
Next is the clin d’oeil to the space itself a square room filled ceiling to floor with childish paintings. Mummy’s private gallery on a giant freezer box. The paintings are rough and ready, stapled to the wall, a painted jacket here a cheap square frame there. The references are fast and easy Mondrian, the use of primary colours is deserving of a gold star, PLOUF, I saw Christian Marclay’s exhibition in the MACBA, it was very good, 0601138811, for those of you who aren’t franceophiles thats the artist’s phone number. These paintings are raw and direct produced out of disdain for the very thing they are, painting. This energy doesn’t break the wall, it lacks virtuosity, legerté and fundamentally meaning.
Perhaps the best thing about an exhibition on a fridge door is the cold beer waiting behind it. Here we have finger paintings with sticks the artist found by the side of the road. The sticks are all from the same tree and have been cut with knives. Yes they are more interesting than the stuttered single lined finger paintings. Where’s that beer, seriously, I am dying here.
Upstairs is a video from and of the Biascamamo family Montage et Pêche à la Traïne dans le Passé à Sète and the tent they lived in on the beach. It’s a far cry from their practices but it does remind one that being an artist is not simply a question of producing objects but a way of life. Valentine Schlegel is presented an artist through the costumes she designed, the models of chimneys she produced, the pottery she threw, the knives she owned and Christian Desse the students she had. Anne Lise Coste answers the formal question of painting with an intelligence that makes her naïvety with regards to painting insupportable (I do love a good support/surface joke). The disdain with which she treats the object and the lack of subjectivity in the action merely amplifies the daring and the subjectivity which Schlegel, the Biascamamo and Desse invest in their practices.

















