What is Critical Figuration?

Current goal

Here is the definition given by its current President, Claude Duvauchelle, and which can be found in the official site on october 2018:

«The essential is not the subject but what emerges from the work itself, what it sends back to us, transmits to us… A work must shake us up, question us, move us, touch us and/or transport us before we even understand the meaning.

Such a work is, in my opinion, successful because “inhabited”, where one instinctively feels behind it an artist delivering us his vision of the world.»

Initial goal

For more informations on this artistic group, see tth officiel website of Figuration critique

And here is what the 2 founders wrote on September 18, 1978:

«The Critical Figuration Show was founded to free us. Because the current world, unpleasant and oppressive, does not make us happy and the Official Art, currently in force, does not please us!

We are pursuing the dream of a powerfully figurative art which would engage us in a progressively emancipatory struggle …

We have been trying to keep the way during these 40 years of presence and struggle against this new Official Art called ‘Contemporary Art’.»