WE PAINT! is an exhibition on the effervescence of painting in contemporary art that will take place from March 24 to April 24, 2022 at the Palais des Études des Beaux-Arts in Paris under the independent curatorship of Cristiano Raimondi, who will also be responsible for the scenography.

This exhibition programmed by the Beaux-Arts de Paris presents this state of contemporary painting through 33 French and foreign artists selected over the last 10 years by the Jean-François Prat Prize, in a scenography specifically created for this occasion in the heart of the emblematic glass courtyard of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris.

WE PAINT! is a contribution to the subject of painting, like the recent exhibitions Stop Painting! at the Fondazione Prada (Venice) or Mixing it Up: painting now, at the Hayward Gallery in London, in 2021.

The exhibition WE PAINT! has received the support of the Bredin Prat Endowment Fund for Contemporary Art.

Featured artists:

Farah Atassi
Janis Avotins
Zander Blom
Chloë Saï Breil-Dupont
Guillaume Bresson
Sol Calero
Nicolas Chardon
Mathieu Cherkit
Jean Claracq
Philippe Decrauzat
Stelios Faitakis
Jonathan Gardner
Miryam Haddad
Kei Imazu
Florian Krewer
Alexandre Lenoir
Turiya Magadlela
Maude Maris
Landon Metz
Anne Neukamp
Gavin Perry
Toyin Ojih Odutola
Li Qing
Raphaëlle Ricol
Nicolas Roggy
Matt Saunders
Pierre Seinturier
Avery Singer
Patricia Treib
SoiL Thornton
Lesley Vance
Rezi van Lankveld
Marine Wallon

Misfire, Le Métier de vivre, Mais pour me parcourir enlève tes souliers and Le Partage d'une passion pour le dessin... The exhibitions of Act 4 summon the physical properties of the works, their capacity for transformation, for displacement, the power of a form to propagate itself in another, its capacity to make deliquescence. Spatial constraint and notion of failure, role of the making and its function, the presented exhibitions imagine the porosity of the spatial and collective norms.

Act 4 of the Theatre of Exhibitions is created by the third class of 2021-22 of the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" program at the Beaux-Arts de Paris. Fifteen student artists from the School work in groups with six curators associated with the program to accompany and develop exhibition projects. But more than exhibitions in the strict sense of the word, it is above all a process, a research and a sharing of ideas.

Act 4 will be punctuated by numerous events: a speed dating for single artists, concerts, performances, readings... A common booklet, bilingual, gathers them to present them.

With the support of the curators of the collections.

The visual identity was designed by Margot Bernard and Caroline Rambaud, students in the program.

Cultural programming in the context of the exhibition :

Wednesday, April 6th
6:30 pm Discussion with Alice Dusapin, researcher, curator and editor about the book Wolfgang Stoerchle: Success in Failure
As part of Misfire

7:45 pm Nefeli Papadimouli performance with 6 performers 30min
As part of Mais pour me parcourir enlever tes souliers

Wednesday April 13th
7:30 pm Performed visit Sharing Partage d'une passion pour le dessin by Emmanuel van der Elst, student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris (approx 15 min)

Wednesday, April 27th
6:30 pm Guided tour of the exhibition Partage d'une passion pour le dessin by Daniel Schlier, artist and teacher at the Beaux-Arts de Paris

6:30 pm Discussion between Matthieu Quinquis, International Observatory of Prisons (OIP); Julie Ramage, artist and Ines Giacometti, lawyer 
As part of Mais pour me parcourir enlever tes souliers

7:30 pm Performed visit Sharing Partage d'une passion pour le dessin by Emmanuel van der Elst, student at the Beaux-Arts de Paris (approx 15 min)

MISFIRE

The Misfire exhibition welcomes works that explore the aesthetic, emotional and subversive potential of failure, whether intentional or unintentional, both in their creative process and in their critical reception. Although the experience of failure occupies a central place in the academic and professional careers of artists trained at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, its traces are discrete in the history of a school marked, both in its competition system and in its architectural decor, by the exaltation of the successes of its "great masters.

Oscillating between the negative emotions traditionally associated with it and the political recuperations that can emanate from it, its ambivalent nature nevertheless incites us to reconsider its impact on both the materiality of the works and the psychology of their authors. Deployed within a scenic space thought as unstable and degenerative, the experiments carried out by the artists gathered in this exhibition invest at different scales the "poetics of the failure": technical failures, repeated failures, individual and mutual sabotages, feigned amateurism, act of political idleness, hijacking of unfinished works or abandoned by their authors, parasiting of the devices of evaluation and legitimization of artistic value...

These undisciplined gestures thus draw multiple counter-productive strategies which put in rout the discourses, the norms and the social representations around the virtuosity and the institutional recognition of the artists. Witnesses of failures as much tested and dis-simulated as assumed and sublimated, these works question the injunctions to success, efficiency and constant attractiveness maintained by an ultra-competitive art world in which no creative impasse seems possible.

Based on an idea by Vincent Enjalbert, associate curator of the program, with the help of Glenn Espinoza, Yanma Fofana, Charline Gdalia, Jean-Baptiste Georjon, Clarisse Marguerite and Caroline Rambaud, students in the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" program.

Artists presented: Geneviève-Charlotte d'Andréis, Atelier Populaire, Antony Béraud, Valentin Bonnet, Jean-Louis Brian, Gwendal Coulon, Honoré Daumier, Gabriel Day, Clément Erhardy, Andreas Février, Jef Geys, Lisa Lavigne, Corentin Leber, Adrien van Melle, Pierre Merigot, Juliette Peres, Loïs Szymczak, Sophie Torrell and anonymous.

Scenography imagined with Noémie Benlolo, Sara Negra and Thelma Vedrine, students of ENSA Paris-Malaquais.

LE MÉTIER DE VIVRE

Some of the objects in the Paris Fine Arts collection, almost a thousand years old, take us back to times when a different history of creation presided.

The books of hours, secular works structuring the day of the faithful through prayer, are aggregates of a medieval society governed by the order of religion and daily life. Made by several hands by scribes, copyists and illuminators, these objects tell us about a period when art conformed to the laws of use and the collective, and the artist to the ranks of the artisan and the anonymous. From the collaborative and horizontal character of these monastic books the exhibition draws a model for thinking about the development of the artist's craft and the activity of its forms.  Imagining a space that takes the form of a workshop-housing, the exhibition invites several students from the wood base of the Beaux-Arts de Paris to group together in the manner of a corporation, to conceive works where furniture, real estate, sculptures and structures are amalgamated. If the development of art has made the thought and the subject prevail over the hand and the object, these artists are gathered here because, to the detriment of the posture of the designer, they choose to renew with the historical position of the builder, and to play with the more contemporary one of the decorator. Behind this decompartmentalization of functions, they claim their belonging to a large society of producers in which they can merge in order to make new fields of action and expression for their forms. An exhibition of works by students, graduates and professors of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Le Métier de vivre also presents works by William Morris. A proponent of design, this nineteenth-century artist, also inspired by the medieval production system, worked to bring together the decorative arts and the fine arts, design and production, beauty and utility, in order to imagine a new art of making and living. This dialogue between creations and creators, beyond the times or disciplines, allows to consider the artist's job as the one who can by the use and the work, unite in the workshop of the world ... art and life.

Based on an idea by Raphaël Giannesini, curator associated with the program, with the help of Yanma Fofana, a student in the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" program. With the support of the curators of the collections.

Artists presented: Pascal Aumaitre, Ludovic Beillard, Marion Chaillou, Xolo Cuintle, Ann Daroch, Jonh Henry Dearle, Francisco G Pinzón Samper, Ninon Hivert, Maître de Jacques de Besançon, Maëlle Lucas-Le Garrec, Matteo Magnant, William Morris, Kiek Nieuwint, Eliott Paquet, Charlotte Simonnet, Raphael Sitbon, William Arthur Smith Benson, Luca Resta, Constantin Von Rosenschild, Philip Webb.

Scenography imagined with Roxanne Bernard and Nour El Blidi, students of the ENSA Paris-Malaquais, and the complicity of the wood base of the Beaux-Arts of Paris.

MAIS POUR ME PARCOURIR ENLÈVE TES SOULIERS

Mais pour me parcourir enlève tes souliers¹ engages a critical reflection on the spatialist conception that considers architectural forms as determining the organization of social practices. Invested with an operational and normative function capable of ensuring the quasi-natural regulation of human behavior, architectural devices would constitute "forms of organization of space, intrinsically carrying good social practices"².

This spatial conception finds its paroxysmal expression in institutions such as the school, the hospital or the prison, where it is a question of avoiding any movement of crowd or confusion, while "raising" the souls and the spirits. Thus, in the prison universe, a separative and cellular logic is imposed, supposedly invested with qualities of its own, capable of punishing, neutralizing, dissuading, and healing individuals in order to better reintegrate them into society later on. Their punishment is as if spatialized, the architectural devices constantly re-evaluated to constrain their bodies and limit their possible exchanges.

The exhibition brings together works that are like so many detour techniques to get out of these sometimes authoritarian spatial conceptions. Faced with fixed spaces, it is a question of exploring moving, adaptable, or even living spaces. Within this exhibition, the artists conceive the writing of space as a score, constantly to be reinterpreted.

1. Title borrowed from Jean Genet in his poem La Parade, 1948

2 Levy J., Lussault M. (2003), Dictionary of geography and space of societies, Paris

Based on an idea by Violette Morisseau, curator associated with the program, with the help of Zoé Bernardi and Amandine Massé, students in the "Artists & Exhibition Professions" program.

Artists presented: Pauline Rose-Dumas, Jules Goliath, Liên Hoang-Xuan, Bahar Kocabey, Raphaël Maman, Amandine Massé, Eadweard Muybridge, Nefeli Papadimouli, Giambattista Piranesi, Julie Ramage, Fabrice Vannier, Chloé Vanderstraeten

Scenography imagined with Marine Henninot and Mathilde Josse, students of ENSA Paris-Malaquais.

LE PARTAGE D’UNE PASSION POUR LE DESSIN

Le Partage d'une passion pour le dessin unveils an exceptional group of 90 drawings, which entered the School's collections thanks to the generosity of the association "Le Cabinet des amateurs de dessins des Beaux-Arts de Paris". The exhibition is organized on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the association, which has acquired more than 200 masterpieces since 2006. The exhibition is organized by school, Italian, Nordic and French through the centuries. Drawings by Eugène Delacroix, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Gerrit Van Honthorst, Giuseppe Penone and Simone Peterzano will be presented. The exhibition ends with a selection of the winners of the Contemporary Drawing Prize, including Marcella Barceló, Tiziano Foucault-Gini and Manon Gignoux.

Curated by Emmanuelle Brugerolles and Raphaëlle Reynaud, mediation by Margot Bernard, Caroline Rambaud, Hugo da Silva, Amandine Massé and Clarisse Marguerite, students of the program.

Since 2005, when it was founded, the association "Le Cabinet des amateurs de dessins des Beaux-Arts de Paris" has been actively involved in enriching the graphic collections of the Beaux-Arts de Paris.
In more than fifteen years, it has been able to complete the collection by acquiring major works by artists who were previously absent from the institution.
Faced with an existing market and modest means, the association, made up of collectors but also of dealers, has been able to choose drawings of great quality, tinged with a certain originality, encouraging students to come and discover them on the occasion of exhibitions organized in the Cabinet des Dessins. She has not hesitated to contribute to an acquisition from the Fonds du Patrimoine du Ministère de la Culture, as in the case of the drawing by Gerrit Van Honthorst presented in this release.
Its eclectic tastes touch all schools but also all centuries, without forgetting contemporary drawing. In 2013, the association created a contemporary drawing prize for a young artist from the Beaux-Arts de Paris, whose work is offered to enrich the school's collection.
Sensitive to the transmission and knowledge of the plastic arts among young people, it has set up for more than a dozen years a pedagogical project with schoolchildren from the academies of Créteil and Versailles, allowing their pupils to discover the beauties of an Italian, French or Nordic sheet, with its techniques and its particularities.
The association le Cabinet des amateurs de dessins, chaired by Daniel Thierry since 2015, wished to unveil this year a part of these acquisitions during an exhibition that will be held from March 22 to April 24 at the Palais des Beaux-arts.