[Text on catalogue]

 

It is always fascinating to discover the new authors that Ia Création Franche presents during its international group exhibition at the start of the school year. This year, they are eight, Cubans, Dutch, French, Swiss, to occupy six of the eleven exhibition rooms of the museum while the exhibition "Art Brut and apparent: thirty years of Free Creation", dedicated to the collection fund continues. Thirty years! A long term during which the vitality of a current of art for a very long time ignored in the conduct of public affairs has never been denied, but of which, in Begles, we have made a priority, just like the live performance, the reading and music.

 

To tell the truth, the plastic arts long cherished to carry the magnificence and to establish the authority of the powerful, lost their splendor in modern times to occupy only the jump seat of the public policies implemented by the capacity. Today, in an era submerged by images, it is singularly paradoxical to note how often they remain relegated to the margins, ignoring in doing so what they say about a society in movement. In addition, turning its back on the essential education in the image of the rising generations, on the critical reading necessary to decipher the continuous flow of information required for an enlightened understanding of the world. It is also on this condition that local action, inscribed in global thinking, dear to the ecologist René Dubos, will find its full relevance. And it is again one of the conditions for laying solid foundations of a "culture of available time and a culture of chosen activities...” of the "civilization of freed time which falls to us" that the philosopher André Gorz is calling.

 

Another reality exists; a different perspective bears on the other, a way of seeing that opens up a large place to otherness and tolerance. It is because I am convinced that the plastic arts and even more Art Brut and Arts Apparentes, and therefore Création Franche, contribute greatly to this, that they have their place in Bègles.

 

Clement Rossignol Puech, Mayor of Bègles, vice-president of Bordeaux Métropole