Two exhibitions of young artists - Reiffers Art Initiatives at Studio les Acacias, and Fondation Pernod Ricard

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I've been a bit lazy with art of late, so to start making up for lost time, today I went to two exhibitions focusing mainly on artists born in the 90s. Both were in places I'd never visited before.

I started at the Studio des Acacias, which is showing Des Corps Libres - une jeune scène française, a Reiffers Art initiative curated by Thibaut Wychowanok. I found Salomé Chatriot's HD videos and big, glossy print on Perspex quite interesting. There was also a very seductive little painting, in fact tiny, of a young man carrying a big black dog. And there was a spectacular piece called Holy Hole by Pol Taburet, 2022 winner of the Reiffers Art Initiatives Prize.

I often tell people one of the problems with buying art by good young artists is that they soon get even better but by then are beyond my price range. Knowing that, I should have bought something when Ali Hasanzadeh put together Pol Taburet's first exhibition at Balice Hertling's Belleville space, instead of hesitating over what seemed to me to be poor finish. That, of course, is now  thing of the past, and toute proportion gardée, Taburet's new works have, to me, something of the impact of Bacon or El Greco.

(Continued after the first set of photos)










I then walked, as it was a nice day, past the Parc Monceau and on through the Europe neighbourhood (think Caillebotte’s Paris Street, Rainy Day in Chicago, only it wasn't raining) to the Fondation Pernod Ricard. There they have an exhibition called Entre tes yeux et les images que j'y vois, focusing, if I understood the handout correctly, on a group of painters who all graduated from the Beaux Arts three or four years ago. The curators are Anaël Pigeat and Sophie Vigourous.

Jean Claracq was present again, this time with an unusually large montage-type painting framed in a way that recalled an Apple iMac - glossy with rounded corners. Opposite the Claracq was a nice piece by Simon Martin, whose work, though different in style, has, so it seems to me, a similar quietly 'domestic' atmosphere to Louis Fratino's homely gay scenes.

Apart from which, I wasn't especially wowed by the show - it had an oddly conservative feel to it - though I quite liked the idea of getting the artists to display a personal collection of books, notepads, photos and trinkets in horizontal cases nearby.




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