The exhibition Future, Former, Fugitive, devoted to “a French scene” is based on an open conception of territorial placement – bringing together artists born in France and abroad, living in France or elsewhere, linked provisionally or lastingly to this country – in particular it escapes from the effects of a tabula rasa dictating that one generation eclipses another. On the contrary, it unites “contemporaries” who today share this evolving space with its porous frontiers. Meanwhile, it seeks to sketch out the routes of transmission through which this mood of the times is conveyed and which is a breath of fresh air simultaneously for the forty-four artists or groups that have here been united. They are artists born between the 1930s and the 1990s, but who all live and work in and within their era.

Contemporary is a “transitive word and thus relational”, Lionel Ruffel reminds us in Brouhaha. Les mondes du contemporain. We are contemporary with something or with someone and it is this interdependency or bond, that allows us to establish a bridge from one artist to another in the exhibition which we have put together in all of the spaces of the Palais de Tokyo. It is once more this permeability to the present and a form of permanence in time which we seemed to notice in the artists in the exhibition and which allowed us to draw up this unexhaustive, but quite simply sensitive, snap of a French scene. Or, rather, of “another” French scene. The one that is being created more discreetly, but no less powerfully, in studios, art schools, shared spaces, on the margins or sheltered from the market.

palaisdetokyo.com/en/exposition/futur-ancien-fugitif