The Pleasure Of Love: the 56th October Salon

‘The pleasure of love lasts only a moment – while – the grief of love lasts a whole life through.’ The opening lines of this 18th century French poem and love song sketch out a pathetic paradox within daily life that still reverberates in the present. Transposed here as the subject of the 56th Belgrade October Salon, ‘The Pleasure of Love: Transient Emotion in Contemporary Art’ examines art in its social and political contexts, contrasting its humane aesthetic values with far less benevolent forces of power and control… In an existential, materialist age of contemporary politics in which public life is characterised, with relatively few exceptions, by bureaucratic obfuscations of vested interests, greed, mendaciousness, stupidity and anger, the 56th Belgrade October Salon focuses on love, the exact opposite of such hateful characteristics, as both a subject and prism through which to view the world.

The first Autumn Salon was organized in Paris in 1903 as an antidote to the blindness of the art establishment by accepting artists who had no other place to show their work. Paintings were exhibited by, the as yet unknown, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Matisse, François Picabia, Paul Gauguin and many others. The 56th Belgrade October Salon, a distant relative of this initiative, pays homage to this illustrious past by showing a number of artists who do not yet have an international platform for their work alongside already established artists. It will also reflect on what transient pleasures, and its opposite, signify when expressed in art today.

In 1784 Jean-Paul-Égide Martini composed Plaisir d’Amour, a classic love song based on a poem by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian who, one of many victims of the Terror of the French Revolution died in 1794. But Florian’s words have echoed across time to still speak in the present, both in Martini’s original arrangement and deformed into kitsch, at once eternal and fleeting. Fully aware of such historical vicissitudes and paradoxes, this October Salon concentrates on what role emotion plays in contemporary art and how it may be framed in ways that are neither banal nor kitsch. This may include the not-so-simple pleasures of love, humor, horror and any other perspectives that art may bring to bear on the fragility of human experience and life which, in itself, may have a transient or long-lasting impact.

The Pleasure of Love, the 56th October Salon, is composed of 60 artists from 27 countries, including Serbia, the Balkan region and the world at large. The Salon takes place in the Belgrade City Museum and in the Cultural Center of Belgrade from the September 23rd until the 6th of November.

– David Elliott