Jérémy Chabaud, Arthur Piza Prize winner and current director of the Association Jeune Création
Jérémy Chabaud, winner of the Arthur Piza Prize and current director of the Association Jeune Création. Photo: Hélio Campos Melo

O French artist Jérémy Chabaud is one of the two laureates of this year's Arthur Luiz Piza Award, an initiative whose proposal is to keep the relationship of young French artists with Brazil and young Brazilian artists with France alive.

Jérémy, who has exhibited in France and the USA, is the current director of Association Jeune Creation, an artists' organization created in 1949. The Association, which he presides, has just won a space at the Fondation Fiminco, in Romainville, in the northwest region of Paris, and also has a place for artists to reside in Marseille, in the south of France. It is considered a fundamental initiative for artists who are not in the market. “For 70 years, Jeune Création has been on the move, reinventing itself and always letting itself be involved by the generations that cross it. She seeks to be a raw and solid reflection of the world and her time”, comments Jérémy.

An important exhibition is held annually, now in your 71st edition in 2020/21, which exhibits the works of 46 artists chosen by a jury made up of young artists and a guest, in this case the art critic and curator Nathalie Desmet. The work methodology, comments Jérémy, is extremely horizontal, since the direction and the work are chosen by the group itself, which is made up for the most part by artists at the beginning of their careers. “Mutual recognition is therefore very important. Much of the discussion is also based on ethical issues: visibility, parity, representation, inclusion. The annual Jeune Création festival is therefore not just an exhibition, but a kind of multi-voice convention; the reflection of an experience that is as human as it is artistic, where collective choices end up becoming the selection: an extract of what seduces us, what marks us, what seems to us promising or necessary to bring to light”, he says. Nathalie Desmet.

On this side of the Atlantic, the engraver Santídio Pereira is chosen by the Arthur Luiz Piza Prize to travel to France in 2022 and carry out his research and residency. He was born in 1996, in Curral Comprido, a small village located in the city of Isaiah Coelho, in the interior of Piaui. He was one of the young people favored by the Achaia Institute, an NGO that assists children and adolescents living near Ceagesp, where Santídio also worked.

“The woodcut served the first interests of the artist, who developed his own working procedures, such as what he calls 'incision, cut and fit', that is, the composition through the combination of several cut matrices, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. head. In addition to providing a play of colors through the accumulation and juxtaposition of ink, this technique allows subverting the multiplicity function, so characteristic of engraving. There are two series of woodcuts that are most representative of Santídio: Birds (2018) and bromeliads (2019). The affective memory led the artist to invest in an iconographic research on the birds of the caatinga of Piauí. Later, from the Kaaysá artistic residency, held in Boiçucanga, the series of bromeliads. Already Morros (2021) emerged with the feeling of freedom when faced with the natural landscape of Santo Antônio do Pinhal, Serra da Bocaina and Cantareira, all in São Paulo", informs the author's biography on the website of the Station Gallery – which has represented him since the beginning of his career. Santídio has just participated in an important exhibition in Shanghai. He rescues reminiscences of colors, images and sensations and his work is at the same time almost minimalist, with a high sensitive content.


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