L'air fut rouge et noir or La réappropriation de l'histoire passe aussi par la peinture.
For this exhibition at La Cour, Jean-Marc Cerino gathers paintings he has produced around the working-class world: Workers' Strike, 1919; Demonstrations of dock workers, Valletta, Malta, 1959; Strike of late October 1948, Pont du Clapier, Saint-Étienne; Miners on strike leaving the site after ceasing work, London 1912. This type of painting, as Jean-Christophe Bailly emphasizes in La reprise et l'éveil : Essai sur l'oeuvre de Jean-Marc Cerino, is not widespread: "It is worth emphasizing from the outset that such titles are rare in contemporary art. In any case, as far as painting is concerned, a history of the representation of factories and the working-class world in general, which would begin at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and end with the most recent states of visibility of productive forces, apart from what was traced within the defunct socialist realism, would not form an immense corpus. [...] It is with the present of immediately contemporary art that Jean-Marc Cerino's painting forms a striking contrast."
The title of the exhibition, The air was red and black, originates from two postcards taken up by the artist, one red and the other black, illustrating the fire of June 5, 1905, on the Place de l'Hôtel-de-Ville in Saint-Étienne, a landmark episode in the urban history of a city in full industrial expansion.
The transition from fire to uprising seems obvious. An uprising, like a fire, can ignite suddenly and, under the influence of the wind, spread rapidly. During a lecture on André Breton and the surrealist revolution—A flag turn by turn red and black—Georges Didi-Huberman specifies: "What colors, then, are our uprisings? André Breton asks himself this question in Arcane 17. Our uprisings are made of the colors that 'derisory chance takes' to demand something unhoped-for from life."
And Jean-Marc Cerino summons the particularly harsh strikes of October 1948 in Saint-Étienne, which were part of a vast national movement supported by the Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labour) and heavily centered on the mining basins.
The artist wished to give the exhibition a subtitle: The reappropriation of history also happens through painting. This reappropriation of history appears as a salvific attitude in the face of History as written by the victors. It constitutes a central gesture, deeply inscribed at the very heart of his work. In Jean-Marc Cerino's studio notes, one can moreover read phrases such as: The rebound manifests itself in the openness of meaning within each painting and in the way it resonates with our present. Questioning our present with images of the past seems to be the only ethically tenable position in art. Recouring to moments from the past would be like gathering momentum in order to multiply the power of affirmation in the present; the recourse to the past becoming a political challenge addressed to the present.
The rebound therefore manifests itself in the openness of meaning specific to each work, but also in the way these images collide with, displace, and interrogate our present. In this perspective, Jean-Marc Cerino's painting is not limited to exhuming fragments of the past: it activates its latent power, its sensitive and political charge. It does not stem from a simple remembrance, but from an act. Thus, the recourse to history does not stem from a retrospective gaze, but from a momentum: that which allows these scenes, charged with struggles and tensions, to continue to act today. Painting then becomes the site of a passage where the past, far from being closed, finds the conditions for its reactivation in our present.
