BERNARD AUBERTIN et. al., SURPRISE, SURPRISE — Galerie Jean Greset, Besançon, 2013

Bernard Aubertin, Jean-Luc Bari, Jean Brault, Nicolas Chardon, Jérôme Conscience, Alberto Cont, Didier Demozay, Philippe Desloubières, Jean-François Dubreuil, Michel Duport, Alan Ebnother, Olivier Filippi, Julian Gil, Hans Glattfelder, Didier Marcel, François Morellet, Charles-Henri Montvert, John Nixon, Antoine Perrot, Sigurd Rompza, Christian Roth, Bruno Rousselot, Robert Schad, Harald Schmitz-Schmelzer, Hugo Schüwer-Boss, Michel Seuphor, Gérald Thupinier, Claude Viallat. Surprise, Surprise. Galerie Jean Greset, Besançon, 13 June–24 August 2013. Exhibition invitation. Double-sided offset-printed card; 21 × 10 cm. Black typography on white stock.

A deceptively simple invitation for a group exhibition bringing together 28 artists around colour, abstraction and constructed form at Galerie Jean Greset in the summer of 2013. The title was not incidental. Throughout 2013 the gallery borrowed titles from The Rolling Stones — She’s a Rainbow, Surprise, Surprise and Paint It Black — before ending the year with Sympathy for the Devil, explicitly marking fifty years of the band’s career.

That gives this particular exhibition a much better frame. In 2013, the Stones had survived long enough to become both history and something still happening. The same could be said of the art gathered here. Michel Seuphor reaches back into the intellectual history of geometric abstraction. François Morellet carries Concrete and systematic abstraction through the post-war period. Bernard Aubertin connects to ZERO; Claude Viallat to Supports/Surfaces. John Nixon, Nicolas Chardon, Didier Demozay and others extend related questions of colour, repetition, geometry and reduction into later generations. Placed together, they complicate the idea that an artistic movement begins, peaks and disappears. The surprise isn’t that abstraction came back. It is that it never left.

The design makes the connection unexpectedly literal. There is no artwork on the front. Instead: SURPRISE, SURPRISE, followed by twenty-eight names. It reads almost like a concert bill. Older figures and younger artists appear in exactly the same typeface, stripped temporarily of chronology and hierarchy. By 2013, some belonged firmly to art history; others were still extending the language in the present. The exhibition does not separate origin from continuation. The Rolling Stones were still touring. So was abstraction. Not quite a retrospective. Not really a revival. More like another date on the tour.

The card becomes an idea within an idea: a borrowed song title used to frame artistic languages that are themselves inherited, repeated, modified and redistributed. Nothing has to return if it never actually disappeared. The material persists. The line-up changes.

Condition: very good. Light handling and minor edge and surface wear consistent with circulation.

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