From May 23 to October 31, the Centre-Val de Loire Region will be staging the first ever Vendôme Triennial. For its first edition, this contemporary art triennial will be showcasing a regional panorama of creative art today in the form of a multi-disciplinary, cross-generational selection made by Emmetrop (curators: Érik Noulette, Nadège Piton, Damien Sausset). Works by 25 visual artists, either from the area or working there regularly—20 of whom have benefitted from creative art support from the DRAC Centre (Regional Direction of Cultural Affairs) or from the Centre-Val de Loire Region,—will take over the city of Vendôme, specifically the 1400 square meters of the Manège Rochambeau, as well as the musée de Vendôme, and other public spaces.

The launch of the rehabilitation program for Vendôme’s state-owned Manège Rochambeau has provided the perfect venue for such an event. This former horse-training centre is a building of imposing dimensions, whose sparse beauty, typical of 19th-century military architecture, covers an area of 1400 square meters, stands nearly 12 m high, and boasts a famous iron armature, all light and air, designed by engineer Camille Polonceau in 1854.

Works in all media—sculpture, installation, video, photography, painting, drawing,— for the most part created especially for the occasion, thus find a home in an original and innovative display concept—the fruit of the fertile imagination of Christophe Moreau,—which offers artists the freedom to appropriate the space in a manner befitting their artworks.

The Manège Rochambeau will thus be transformed into a kind of multicolored mini-city, a labyrinth of forms and volumes calculated to ensure a truly astonishing visit.

There the public will be able to discover hitherto unexhibited works by Quentin Aurat & Émilie Pouzet, Rémi Boinot, Karine Bonneval, Thierry-Loïc Boussard, Baptiste Brévart & Guillaume Ettlinger, Bernard Calet, Combey Pion, Sanjin Cosabic, Mario D'Souza, Mathieu Dufois, the Galerie du Cartable Collective, Geoffroy Gross, Nils Guadagnin, Hayoun Kwon, Seba Lallemand, Olivier Leroi, Cécile Le Talec, Marie Losier, Malik Nejmi, Jérôme Poret, Massinissa Selmani, and Dorothy-Shoes.

Rich in collections of ancient art, historic furnishings, and ethnographic objects, for its part the musée de Vendôme will play host to a vast installation by Saâdane Afif, who revisits the ready-made Fountain Archives by Marcel Duchamp dating to 1917 in a museum piece shown here for the first time in France.

Mr. Plume & IncoNito will scatter graffiti about the city, while Catherine Radosa will unveil an open-air audio piece.

With 25 artists from all generations and working in every type of media, the watchword is diversity.

If the ambition of certain artists, such as Geoffroy Gross and Sanjin Cosabic, is to explore what underlies the pictorial act, others lay the stress rather on our tools for recording reality, such as video. This is the case with Marie Losier, who joins forces on this occasion with the Galerie du Cartable. Their collaboration has resulted in an operational film-set together with a cinema screening a regular schedule of films by the artists present at the Triennial. Some of these moving pictures spawn truly astonishing fictions and conjure up dark worlds or fairylands, often singularly offbeat, as in the piece by Mathieu Dufois. Other videos attempt to develop a precarious synthesis between a personal world and the great questions that face our planet, as in the amazing film by Malik Nejmi. The same questioning of contemporary history and of how it is constructed surfaces in Hayoun Kwon’s video, a piece that revisits a tragic period in the history of the two Koreas. The relationship to the real can also be tackled by taking a step back from everyday existence or by disrupting it, as demonstrated in installations by Bernard Calet and the Baptiste Brévart & Guillaume Ettlinger tandem, as well as by Karine Bonneval’s abstract sculptures in sugar. For Massinissa Selmani, the image, whether hand drawn or derived from the Press, takes on an openly political dimension. As for the photographs of Dorothy-Shoes, they attest to a subjective investigation into how individuals affected by illness forge a new relationship to the body. The graffiti practices of Mr. Plume & IncoNito, meanwhile, need to be viewed as an interrogation into the forms the image can adopt in the public sphere. Nils Guadagnin, or in a more colorful register Mario D’Souza, both incite viewers to reject the vision of the world imposed on us by TV and the media to experience instead the awesome power of natural phenomena. The performances of Quentin Aurat & Émilie Pouzet poke fun at how people can be ruled by habit. Catherine Radosa’s sound installation stems from an almost ethnological investigation of the city of Vendôme. Others appearing in the Triennial are engaged instead in the experimental deconstruction of the languages of art: these include Combey Pion, presenting photographs of sculptures of everyday objects made out of paper, Seba Lallemand and his pictorial games that verge on total abstraction, Cécile Le Talec and her impressive audio piece, and Jérôme Poret, who dazzles us with a virtuoso spoof on the aesthetic codes of rock music. Lastly, several artists responding to the global crisis affecting the contemporary world deploy humor as a distancing mechanism, as in Olivier Leroi’s deceptively “ethnic” objects.

Any account of the exhibition selection would not be complete without hailing the presence of a number of atypical artists, such as SaâdaneAfif, a native of Vendôme, who today enjoys an enviable international recognition, and Thierry-Loïc Boussard, who left us prematurely and whose protean pictorial oeuvre appears especially relevant today. And, last but not least, the Triennial heralds an opportunity to discover the most recent video and sculpture piece by Rémi Boinot, at once regional artist and artistic facilitator.

So there are 25 artists, 20 selected from the roster of recipients of creative arts funding, and 5 freely chosen by the curators from among the most iconic artists of the Centre-Val de Loire Region. If some are well-known to the public, many others remain to be discovered. Similarly, if a high percentage belong to the up-and-coming generation, others have reached mid-career. All are invited to exhibit works either produced especially for the occasion or seldom previously shown in public.

Text by Damien Sausset

For more information visit www.triennale-vendome.fr