With works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Ulla von Brandenburg, Alfred Courmes,
Sylvie Fanchon, Dora García, Shilpa Gupta, Sharon Hayes, Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza,
Matthieu Saladin, and Marie Velardi, from the collection of the Frac Franche-Comté.

The exhibition presented at 19, Crac brings together works from the collection of the Frac Franche-Comté. Its title is borrowed from an enigmatic painting created by Alfred Courmes in 1960, Ave Maria, le Cyclope n’avait qu’un œil mais c’était le bon, a work that has been part of the Frac collection since 1986.

This painting, by an artist who was at one time associated with Surrealism, depicts a clergyman observing a little girl whose figure is borrowed from an enamel advertising plaque produced by the Japy company for Meunier chocolate. Previously shown in Montbéliard in 2013 at the Musée du Château des ducs de Wurtemberg, the work then allowed the institution to resonate with the local industrial heritage and its links to religion. This is quite different in the context of today’s exhibition, which, through the Frac collection, seeks to present various artistic perspectives on our world.

Since 2006, the Frac Franche-Comté has been enriching its collection around the broad issue of time and its corollaries: duration, movement, space, entropy, memory, etc. It includes visual, sound-based, performative, and immaterial works, and has opened up to transdisciplinary practices, reflecting artists who constantly explore new artistic territories. The selection for the exhibition at 19, Crac brings together ten artists from diverse backgrounds who seek to recount the turbulence of our world and to imagine its future through works that use language for its narrative and political dimensions. These singular voices express themselves through sculpture, installation, film, painting, and sound works, relating historical facts, testimonies of trauma in hostile environments, anecdotes, fictions, and visionary perspectives.

Le Cyclope n’avait qu’un œil mais c’était le bon thus questions the way artists look at our society and environment, as well as their perceptiveness and vigilance. It also implicitly questions how a public collection becomes, in turn, a narrative of our time and our world, when it tells its story through the works it comprises and when it is presented in a context conducive to reflection and the exchange of ideas.

Co-curators of the exhibition: Adeline Lépine and Sylvie Zavatta