Time Will Tell

Artists: Boris Achour, Camille Blatrix, Katinka Bock, Isabelle Cornaro, Tatiana Trouvé, Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Raphaël Zarka

Curators: Thomas Boutoux and Paola Santoscoy

Winning a prize is an honor, a reward, a bliss. It is a feeling more than anything else. Even the attention it brings to the winner is a fugitive one. Prizewinners come and go, like seasons. An exhibition based on the history of a prize, the outstanding Ricard Prize, which was inaugurated in 1999, and since has distinguished an emerging artist on the young French art scene each year, invites us to think beyond the very logic of what a prize does, which is to single out a personae at a given time. Instead, it asks to consider what can be common, continuous, reiterative in a situation that the award of the Prize creates in the life and work of an artist.

Hence, this situation always happens midstream: it’s neither a starting nor an end point, but a time in a career, one both settled and unsettled, stabilized and troubled. Among the artists in the exhibition, Tatiana Trouvé was awarded the Ricard Prize some 15 years ago, while Camille Blatrix is a much more recent recipient, from 2014. This exhibition of seven of the artists who won the Prize since its inception, calls attention to how artists, undistracted by competition for fame and prizes, develop a practice in the long run, maintain deliberate, conscious control, keeping to the plan, the subject, the gait and the direction of the work.

El Eco, here, wishes to highlight the long-lasting support, and trust, of the Ricard Foundation for the artists who, once, have won the Prize, knowing that what matters is as much what the work is as where it’s going. The exhibition Time Will Tell pays interest to how an artist life and practice and the works that it produces represent figures of adaptations, transitions, and transactions, in a world, especially today, with fewer and fewer assurances of futurity. 

El Eco—a museum without a collection—as Goeritz and Mont envisioned it, is a space where the experiential and the transitory are central to its conception, where flows and effects win over objects. In this sense, Time Will Tell focuses on the sensorial perception of this building and its spatial, social and aesthetic discourse, to allow the artworks to take place.

The exhibition will be a coproduction between Museo Experimental El Eco, Pernod Ricard Mexico and the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard. Since the beginning, the collaboration between El Eco, which is part of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) since 2005 and the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard has grown naturally in strength. Like El Eco, the Foundation is an experimental, interdisciplinary space. Established in 2006, the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard has been a springboard for a whole generation of artists. The Foundation exists to back today's French art and increase its visibility nationally and internationally.

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