Figuration Libre: On the History of the Association

Abstract

This article is devoted to the Figuration Libre association which became a landmark in the French art of the 1980s. The activity of the group members was perceived as a fundamental break with the non-spectacular art practice of the previous generation. In the reflection of the curator of the Figuration Libre Hervé Perdriolle, artist Ben Vautier, who participated in the promotion of young artists, and critics Suzanne Pagé, Otto Hahn, and Catherine Strasser, their main strategy was to establish new relations with everyday life and revise the boundaries and territories of art. In the works of the Figuration Libre, artists focus on the tendencies of the return of decorative and ornamental principles; also, the reconstruction of the pictorial medium is associated with the revival of “spontaneity”, the appeal to the lower, marginal language, and the restoration of the autonomous grammar of art. The members of the association form a specific vocabulary, close to the language of comics, graffiti, and mass media printed products, embodying the characteristic tendencies of the art of postmodernism, trying to overcome the crisis of representation. Their imagery is addressed to profane forms of culture, kitsch travesty and play quoting of “high” sources, where infantile optics transforms the logic of the avant-garde into entertainment. Emotionality and plastic emancipation in the spirit of “barbarous” syncretism is opposed to the intellectual elitism of conceptual gestures. Such strategies characterise the international phenomenon of the late 1970s and early 1980s, i.e. the art of the New Wave, bringing together the search of German neo-expressionism, the Italian Trans-avantgarde and artists of the East Village. The commonality of these aspirations was determined by the arrangement of the exhibition “5/5 Figuration Libre, France / USA”, which united French masters and their American colleagues, such as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. However, in the second half of the 1980s, the collective activity of artists ceased, completing the history of the association and the New Wave in France.