The Agricultural Show has closed its doors but that of “Artgriculture” has just opened in Toulouse where the Abattoirs contemporary art museum offers an astonishing dialogue between “Artists & Farmers” which echoes the questions asked by the agricultural crisis.
Coming to hit the news, the exhibition project, open since March 1 and until the end of August on the banks of the Garonne, nevertheless took root “a year and a half, two years ago”, tells AFP Lauriane Gricourt, director of Abattoirs and one of the co-curators.
“We wanted to create a dialogue between art and agriculture, because it’s a subject that is rarely or not addressed in the art world,” she explains.
“Farmers play a very central role in our society, they produce what we eat, are at the heart of society but yet remain on the fringes, these are professions that are barely visible, that we do not hear , except at this moment, we started a little from all that to imagine our exhibition”.
Spotted at the entrance by a life-size wooden sculpture of a large “International Harvester” tractor, created by the artist Pascal Rivet, the visitor begins his stroll with a reflection on the representations of the farmer.
Pietà in the milking parlor
Visitors to the exhibition “Artists and Peasants. Beating the Countryside” at the Abattoirs contemporary art museum in Toulouse, March 8, 2024 / Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP
Far from the classic paintings of Millet which we see elsewhere in a small “peasant museum” installed in a corner of the exhibition or “from the cliché of the old peasant with his cap and his checkered shirt”, the painter Julien Beneyton for example, chose to sketch young girls from the Paraclet agricultural high school, near Amiens.
“I found these young people solar and I wanted to show that this also exists”, says about this painting entitled “The world is yours” (The world is yours) this realist painter who has rather made himself known for his urban representations or the hip-hop universe.
The artist Damien Rouxel has taken his parents’ farm as the setting for his work, which he poses in photographic stagings reproducing great works of art history, with for example a Pietà installed in a milking room, where he embodies Christ and his mother the Virgin Mary.
Visitors to the exhibition “Artists and Peasants. Beating the Countryside” at the Abattoirs contemporary art museum in Toulouse, March 8, 2024 / Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP
From this farm, “an incredible source of imagination for (him) as a child”, he took a decor and to “come and question people’s preconceptions about this environment”, he says.
The current agricultural protest movement also inspires him: “what I find extremely interesting is how visually it is treated in the media, the codes, I have gleaned lots of images, there is obviously a tractor, fire not far away, banners with super impactful slogans,” he explains, delighted with his harvest.
Art and pig
Visitors to the exhibition “Artists and Peasants. Beating the Countryside” at the Abattoirs contemporary art museum in Toulouse, March 8, 2024 / Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP
Themes heard about the farmers’ dams this winter run through all the works in the exhibition, showing how the artists, some of whom define themselves as “art farmers”, had perceived their acuteness for years: constraints linked to productivity, standards, ecological issues and the relationship with living things, transmission of farms, etc.
In his series of photos called “Production Objectives”, the artist Thierry Boutonnier depicts himself explaining the price of milk to a cow or the meat processing line to a pig.
A visitor to the exhibition “Artists and Peasants. Beating the Countryside” at the Abattoirs contemporary art museum in Toulouse, March 8, 2024 / Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP
“I was addressing the main exploited to inform them of their future,” he said, in a denunciation of “the idea that it is absolutely necessary to produce, a contradictory injunction because the cycles of life and the earth, despite all its generosity , cannot produce under the conditions to which it is subjected.
“Today, the news has caught up with us, with this impression of being in the spirit of the times whereas initially when I started working, it was not,” underlines Julien Beneyton whose series of paintings on breeders did not at the time appeal to his Parisian gallery for whom cows were “not sexy”.
2024-03-16 15:18:36
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