The present edition of the itinerant biennial Jeune Création Europeénne, by reaffirming its vocation to reveal the creative tendencies of young European artists, follows a new selection model, involving the artists directly in the process, many times hard and discouraging, of the crossing from the art school to the art market.
Being all in equal circumstances in what concerns this aspect, the present selection did not seek, apart from this one, any other affinity: it is not thus a traditional curating work, but a selection of young creators’ proposals, whose expectation and will to develop a body of work grounded on the artistic production has led them to apply.
One may certainly find, nonetheless, several affinities amongst the proposals, including among artists who received their education in different art schools. It is also noticeable the predominance of proposals by artists that have studied in Lisbon, since it was from there that most of them arrived at the Museu Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso.
The curating work has thus seek for this edition to select works that revealed a quality level based on underlying objective criteria, namely: pertinence of the relation object-theme; pertinence of the themes themselves; a certain level of innovation in the approach; domain of the chosen techniques; solidness (the possible, in the beginning of a career) of the theoretical arguments upholding the work; and, finally, the aesthetic formulation of those propositions. Notions like multiculturalism or references to the personal experience of relating to the History of Art are in evidence.
The future will dictate the course of these young artists, but the determination to show work and the ability to produce a singular discourse that they clearly show is already an important step to a promising path. The sharing of the Portuguese proposals and their integration in an exhibition with the growing dimensions of the itinerant biennial Jeune Création Européenne will serve simultaneously two purposes: the potential acknowledgement by the artists of the importance that the opening to new contexts and language confrontation may produce in their own discourses; and, on the other hand, the influence that an event of this kind may have in the acknowledgement of these proposals and the opening of new possibilities for the development of the future work of these young artists.