2023 – Centre Pompidou, National Museum of Modern Art, Paris, France

Participation to the acquisition of Ivan Messac’s Les Chieurs by the Centre Pompidou

Ivan Messac, the youngest artist of the Figuration narrative movement, was twenty years old in May 68, the year he began painting, and twenty-four years old when he created Les Chieurs. A committed artist, he uses figuration to produce a critical discourse on Western society: women's rights, decolonization, the Vietnam War, ecology... all current topics are found in his paintings. From the beginning of the 1970s, he also nourished a reflection on the theory of color. Les Chieurs, painted in 1972, are the result of this thought and one of the artist's most accomplished works.

In each of the seven elements making up this polyptych, the same rather light image of children laughing and sitting on their chamber pot (hence the title) is repeated but with a different dominant color - in a serial logic inspired by poster and photography, reminiscent of Andy Warhol. A secondary image, different each time, connotes the meaning of each of the paintings, depending on the dominant color. In the first painting of the series, for example, the dominant is red. This color being associated with revolutions and radical change, it is Maoist children that the artist chooses to depict as an image within the image, in counterpoint to the “shits” on their potty. Les Chieursconstitutes a reflection on the codes unconsciously associated by our modern culture with certain colors, proving that no artistic choice is innocent and that the meaning of a painting is as much in the eye of the painter as in that of the spectator.

The artist never wanted to part with this work which he considered, upon its completion, to be his major creation, hoping that a museum would acquire it.

Ivan Messac, Les Chieurs, 1972, vue de l’œuvre. © Galerie T&L