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The 18th International Festival of Painting at Cagnes-Sur-Mer
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11473 |
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THE ARTS
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10 / 1986 |
1,013 Words |
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Jean-Pierre Gabriel
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Every year since 1969 the enchanting site of Cagnes-sur-Mer, a small city on the French Riviera between Nice and Cannes, hosts one of the most important artistic manifestations in France, the International Festival of Painting. Between July and the end of September, 30,000 to 40,000 visitors press into the celebrated Grimaldi Castle on top of the old medieval fortified village of Haut-de-Cagnes, to view the works of living artists from more than fifty nations.
One of the main interests of this international event is to provide a unique source of information on current major trends in art in all these countries. A glance at the festival catalogues of the eighteen years since the creation of the event also allows one to draw significant conclusions about recent developments in the art world.
First of all, one notes a striking tendency toward internationalism: national characteristics are less and less pronounced. This year's Latin-American representation is exemplary in this respect. The imbricated squares of Peru's Gloria Li-Mir, the pleasant colorful fantasies of Colombia's Beatriz Duque, or the lyrical abstract art of the Dominican Republic's Pedro Terreiro could have been produced anywhere in Denmark, Italy, or California. Only in the Senegalese, Chinese, and Syrian selections can one still perceive the influence of traditional ethnic art. Biblical inspiration is visible in the works of Israel's Eli Kopelevitz and Eli Shamir, but the feeling of existential angst that emanates from their dark skies and tortured figures is definitely reminiscent of German Expressionism.
A second tendency is evidence of a movement toward tremendous eclecticism in styles. Although distinctions between nationalities have become less clear, an astonishing array of approaches - which often cross national lines - have come to the fore. The influence of abstract expressionism is still very strong, but it is no longer the dominant style that it was in the 1950s. Many other conceptions of art have emerged or re-emerged in recent years, challenging each other and preventing the hegemony of any one approach. While for many years United States art schools such as those in New York of Chicago largely set the pattern for art worldwide, this is no longer the case. Since the beginning of the 1980s, the art world has seemed to have lost its center, and the field is open for the most varied forms of expression. A clear sign of this development in the United States is the new rise of West European artists who have been ignored for many years by the American critics. Now German artists such as Joseph Beuys and Sigmar Polke or Italians such as Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia have become the rising stars of the U.S. art market.
The 1986 display at Cagnes-sur-Mer showed a great profusion of styles. One remarkable trend is a certain return to more traditional techniques of design. The potentialities of figurative painting are being rediscovered, even though it remains mostly an instrument of a transformed vision of reality. The South Korean painters Suk-Ju Lee and Chul-Soon Lim (whose works could be seen at the Critical Figuration Salon in Paris last June), as well as Jong-Halk Kim, are characteristic of this tendency. Very modern in their free interpretation of reality, these artists remain traditional in their treatment of reliefs and figures. Kim's surreal L'homme au bandage (Bandaged Man) realistically depicts a youth thrusting himself against the back of the canvas in an effort to break through - but a portion of this chest emerges
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