A world to your image

THE WINNERS OF THE EMERIGE REVELATIONS GRANT

The Métropole Toulon Provence Méditerranée and the art centre villa Noailles are especially pleased to host in Toulon the exhibition of the Emerige Revelations Grant

Thanks to this partnership, the Emerige Endowment Fund, standing as an unstinting support for the emerging art scene, and the exhibition curator Gaël Charbau give these eleven young talents the opportunity to present their work to an ever-wider audience.

For this first edition, artist Néphéli Barbas, 2019 Emerige Revelation, will produce a site-specific artwork at the Ancien Evêché de Toulon throughout a one-month residency, in partnership with the Ecole Supérieure d’Art et de Design in Toulon.

One of the artists, selected by a jury “from the South” will then be invited for a residency at the villa Noailles in 2021.

In this way, the villa keeps asserting its vocation to support young artists in the long run and to present their creations.

This project is part of a new dynamic bringing together the Musée d’art de Toulon, the école Camondo Méditerranée, the École Supérieure d’Art et de Design Toulon Provence Méditerranée and the national scene Châteauvallon-Liberté. Every year, Centre Pompidou’s design collections in the summer, the Emerige Revelations Prize in the fall and an exhibition of designers’ drawings in the spring will constitute a multidisciplinary cultural offer in the very heart of Toulon.

These projects take shape at the Hôtel des Arts, a noteworthy building built in the 1900s. Its artistic direction was recently entrusted to the villa Noailles and to its director Jean-Pierre Blanc by the Métropole with a view to providing a generous offer and access to culture for all, in keeping with the preoccupations the Metropole has been deeply committed to since its inception.

“The art centre villa Noailles and the Emerige Revelations Grant share common values: to support and to promote every year a selection of young designers through competitions.
This partnership originated basing on this shared mindset and allowed to send the Emerige Revelations Grant abroad for the first time.”

Jean-Pierre Blanc

The 2019 edition of the Grant was entitled “L’effet Falaise”. We were far from imagining, at that time, how much the following months would illustrate this cliff edge effect. An abrupt change with unforeseeable consequences which appeared to fit both with the state of the world and the practice of some artists seeking an aesthetic breaking point.

The selection process of this new edition obviously unfolded in special circumstances regarding the form, but the essence of our work remains unaltered. With Olivier Antoine, founder of the Galerie Art : Concept, our selection committee chose eleven artists this year: seven women and four men. Influenced as usual by the invited gallery’s approach, this new edition devotes a strong place to image and specially to painting. Regarding whether the limits of its materiality (Clémence Mauger), its critical, introspective or initimate horizon (Ludovic Salmon, Elené Shatberashvili), its ability to turn derisory into strange (Raphaël-Bachir Osman) or conversely, regarding the vibrant and sensual poetry of its flesh (Marcella Barceló), painting keeps standing out as a field of experiment and expression for younger generations. Painted figures deployed in space (Charlotte Vitaioli), forms as escaped from a story we would have to reconstruct (Zohreh Zavareh), the space itself painted (Rob Miles), pictoriality of the video image (Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis), even when artists are getting farther from the traditional media, it is about playing with stories and references (Loucia Carlier) or imagining sceneries for the exchange and the combination of know-how (Giuliana Zefferi) where experimental becomes enmeshed with a long-standing tradition of making.

For many young intellectuals, it is no longer about knowing how to “inhabit the world” but rather how to co-exist with the world: modernity which used to systematise tabula rasa and to claim for the new against the old, is dissipating in pain. A new common reflection succeeds modernity, a reflection on “dealing with” all forms of life while avoiding to repeat past mistakes. This model of co-existing allows not only the co-existing of forms but above all to break down their barriers: nothing is hermetic in this ecosystem. It is a plastic reflection, and there is no doubt that the aesthetic experience - the one all this generation of artists is working on, in the footsteps of its elders - will keep nourishing the models of those who seek to rethink the world.

Gaël Charbau
curator of the exhibition

Created in 2014 under the impulse of Laurent Dumas, President of the Emerige Group, the Emerige Revelations Grant is aimed at visual artists, regardless of their practice, younger than 35 years old, French or living in France and who are not represented by a professional gallery. This year, the work of the 11 finalists, chosen from more than 500 applicants, will be showcased in a collective exhibition designed by the exhibition curator Gaël Charbau. Selected by a jury of figures from the art world, the winner - whose name was announced on October 15th 2020 – will be rewarded with professional support, a workshop available for one year and a global grant of €15,000 to produce her first solo exhibition. For this seventh edition, the Galerie Art : Concept has teamed up with the winner, named LOUCIA CARLIER.

It succeeds to the following French galleries:
• Galerie In Situ – fabienne leclerc (2014)
• Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois (2015)
• Galerie Michel Rein (2016)
• Galerie Papillon (2017)
• Galerie Jérôme Poggi (2018)
• Galerie gb agency (2019)

The Grant already helped reveal the work of several artists, starting with the winners of the five first editions: Vivien Roubaud (Galerie In Situ – fabienne leclerc), Lucie Picandet (Galerie GeorgesPhilippe & Nathalie Vallois), Edgar Sarin (Galerie Michel Rein), Linda Sanchez (Galerie Papillon), Paul Mignard (Galerie Jérôme Poggi) and Paul Heintz. All of them are highly active on the artistic scene ever since.

Other finalists also benefited from a springboard offered by the Grant, giving them the opportunity to be seen and represented, as were Kevin Rouillard (solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo), Bianca Bondi (Busan and Gwangju Biennales), Carlotta BaillyBorg (Ricard Prize), Charlie Aubry (Audi Talent), Apolonia Sokol (resident at the Villa Médicis). Other ones such as Randa Maroufi, Victoire Thierrée and Alice Guittard were invited for residency at Istanbul (The Pill) or at Belgrade (Hestia international).

As part of the “1 building, 1 work” charter signed with Ministry of Culture in 2016, Emerige called on artists from the Revelations for the commission of site-specific works within its buildings. LouisCyprien Rials, Ugo Schiavi, Keita Mori and Alexis Hayère were therefore commissioned and their works have been permanently installed in Saint-Denis, in Pecq, in Massy and in Bezons.

Marcella Barceló

Loucia Carlier

Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis

Clémence Mauger

Rob Miles

Raphaël-Bachir Osman

Ludovic Salmon

Elené Shatberashvili

Charlotte Vitaioli

Zohreh Zavareh

Giuliana Zefferi

One of the artists, selected by a jury “from the South”, will be awarded a prize consisting in an invitation for residency at the villa Noailles and in the Métropole de Toulon in 2021 and will be given the opportunity to present works for an exhibi-tion at the Ancien Evêché Toulon in 2021.

The jury consists of:

Sam Stourdzé,
President of the jury Director of the villa Médicis, French Academy, Rome

Solenn Morel,
Director of the art centre Les Capucins, Gap

Jérémy Chabaud,
Director of Jeune Création, Paris, Marseille

Anne Racine,
Director of the Villa Carmignac, Hyères

Isabelle Bourgeois,
Director of the TPM Art centre villa Tamaris, La Seyne sur Mer

Margaret Iragui,
Director of the Ecole Camondo Méditerranée, Toulon

Jean-Marc Avrilla,
Director of the Ecole d’art et de Design TPM, Toulon

Jean-Pierre Blanc,
Director of the villa Noailles, Hyères

Julien Carbone,
Director of the Galerie l’Axolotl, Toulon

Néphéli Barbas
2019 EMERIGE Revelation

Néphéli Barbas’ drawings, objects, sculptures and installations deconstruct and sunder structures, architectures and images that make up reality. She studies a visual aspect of urban environment that would stand for the identity heritage specific to a district or a city. In this manner, she cultivates in her installations ambivalence between overall view and thorough field inspection, between architectural planning and botanical evolution.