This exhibition takes place at the museum of fine arts
20, quai Émile Zola – 35000 Rennes

As part of Exporama

Color is a central subject in art and the sensitive experience we have of it every day is an elementary fact of our relationship to works of art. The exhibition La couleur crue, that is curated by 40mcube, La Criée, and the Rennes museum of fine arts, brings together contemporary creations whose raw material questions our sensibility thanks to their color. Raw, natural, transposed, but also simply suggested or filmed, this raw color refers to the elements provided in profusion by nature, to the telluric forces and to the common bases of a plurimillennial history of art and color. It can underline the desire for a form of simplicity, out of step with the sophistication of industrial and materialistic societies.

The exhibition unfolds progressively in the spaces of the Museum of Fine Arts, from the most raw material-color to the most immaterial. The tour begins with works whose color is that of the material that composes them, in its simplest form. It continues with artists who are interested in materials, and thus in the techniques and know-how they experiment with. A third part gives their place to the “immaterials” which also constitute the works: symbolism, allusions, the meaning that is carried by the works. Finally, the tour ends with the decomposition of matter, color and light, raising some essential questions in the artistic field: how do the works free themselves from their support? how does the treatment of light come into play? how does the process of perception take over the confrontation with a fixed object?

Jean-Roch Bouiller (Rennes museum of fine arts), Sophie Kaplan (La Criée), Anne Langlois (40mcube)