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Theme 2024 : Free the Material

The theme invites the galleries and artists present to respond with new creations/works illustrating the plastic power of materials, the richness of the materials used and the artist’s dialogue with the material (combat, fusion).

The study of the material elements that have contributed to the creation of a work of art is often relegated to the background in favour of aesthetics. A work of art is material: it is made of matter, whether natural, transformable or manufactured. A material that is used becomes a material (with an intention, a process of transformation with the qualities of a material.

Since the twentieth century, artists’ environments have been moving away from traditional fine art, its forms and techniques. Oils, pencils and brushes are replaced by cotton threads, steel wires, feathers, wooden sticks, shapes cut out of steel or mirror plates, shaped with plaster or any other material the artist sees fit to use. The work can even be doubled in size, thanks to the use of carefully designed lighting, in which the shadow cast by the material gives rise to a figure! The artist gives the materials a form of autonomy, allowing themselves to be guided by the ‘intelligence of the material’. This conception of art resonates with Georges Bataille’s writings on formlessness and with the Supports-Surfaces artists of the 1970s, who rejected aestheticism and questioned the traditional medium. Claude Viallat and Dezeuze dissociated the canvas from the stretcher and discovered the plastic power of materials.

Today, matter has become an essential component in the creative process, with the introduction of new materials and media. It has gone beyond plastic language to become an aesthetic component. The artist enters into a dialogue with the material in a relationship that is either combative or fusional. In so doing, they open up a new space and free themselves from all the constraints of classical representation. The material becomes an imprint of the creative gesture, revealing the inventiveness and ingenuity of the artist.

L’art et la matière evokes not only the creative process, in which the artist expresses an idea or a feeling, but also the craft aspect of art, with its trials, its approximations and its retouching. The obsessive presence of matter is real. It allows certain artists to play with it (Eugène Leroy), to divert it (Claude Viallat), to introduce the notion of emptiness (Yves Klein, Jaume Plensa) and of light (Pierre Soulages, Bill Viola). The theme also provides an opportunity to explore the dematerialised dimension through the visual and digital arts (Julien Creuset, Ethel Lilienfeld).

Entitled Free the Material, the theme for the 2025 edition of Lille Art Up! brings together the fields of sensibility and knowledge, art and craft, the misappropriation of materials and the recycling of everyday materials. Its aim is to give materials their rightful place in the creative process, through their aesthetic qualities, the difficulty (or otherwise) of taming them, the symbols they embody, the innovations they give rise to, and through experiments ranging from the accumulation of materials to video and digital installations, from aluminium and copper sculptures to hand-dyed wool.

It’s also, and above all, a tribute to the virtuosity, ingenuity and even mischief of artists, and to the intelligence of the hand.

Consult the Lille Art Up! 2024 catalog (only available in French):