Contemporary French Art 2 : Gerard Garouste, Colette Deble, Georges Rousse, Genevieve Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joel Kermarrec, Daniele Perronne, Daniel Dezeuze, Philippe Favier, Daniel

Gerard Garouste, Colette Deble, Georges Rousse, Genevieve Asse, Martial Raysse, Christian Jaccard, Joel Kermarrec, Daniele Perronne, Daniel Dezeuze, Philippe Favier, Daniel Nadaud: after the eleven essays of Contemporary French Art 1, devoted to major artists from Ben Vautier and Niki de Saint Phalle to Annette Messager and Gerard Titus-Carmel, the present volume pursues its interrogations of the what, the how and the why of contemporary plastic production of some of France's finest practitioners. If, as ever, such production can reveal elements of an interweaving of individualized preoccupations and modes, endless specificities demarcate and affirm originalities that pure theory and its leveling anonymity may obscure. Thus is it that Gerard Garouste is alone in that obsession with 'indianness' and 'classicalness'; that Colette Deble's gesture is drawn implacably to the unseenness of female representation; that Georges Rousse plunges photography into the realm of matter's poetic sacredness; that Genevieve Asse traverses a pure seemingness of abstraction to attain to an intimacy of silence; that Martial Raysse's 'hygiene of vision' may endlessly renew and hybridize itself. Christian Jaccard, too, will explore with uniqueness an art of materiality at the frontier of metaphysics; Joel Kermarrec will offer us the inimitable exquisite traces of surging desire and deception; Daniele Perronne's boxes and stringings, her paintings and her sheetings will unfold a psychic infinity at the heart of form. And, if Daniel Dezeuze seeks namelessness and pure structuration, the latter yet surge forth via works that relentlessly identify a gesture so distant, we may feel, from the at once sobering and ceremonial microproliferations of a Philippe Favier or the tense but genial articulations of Daniel Nadaud's sculptural imagination.