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SurfArt Exhibition: Retro Future“The future is no longer what it used to be!” read the posters found all over the town of Saint-Gilles Croix de Vie, Vendée last late summer, this text showing itself above the picture of a stylized model car designed for a single person and a surfboard. The poster – half in black and white to represent the notion of “retro” and half in color to suggest that of the “future” – sparked my interest, and so I decided to visit the exhibition it promoted.  Organized by the collective of surf-artists Right Time Right Place and the city of Saint-Gilles Croix de Vie, the exposition took place at the Salle Marcel Baudoin during the month of October, 2016. It featured numerous pieces by twenty-two artists from France, all passionate about surfing. The main theme of the exhibit, as exposed in its title, was the notions of retro and modernity applied to surfing. It therefore contained innovative pieces as well as ideas that had been conceived in the past but that were never developed, along with many photos, paintings and sculptures to illustrate the different eras of surfing that occurred in the past and its possible futures.Rather than illustrating the notion of “future” in surfing by showing mechanical surfboards that would allow surfers to surf without having to paddle, the artists decided to focus on what we commonly call “the spirit of surfing”. This spirit of surfing, borrowed from the Hawaiians and Tahitians, started to develop with Peter Cuming and famous surfers such as Nat Young in 1995. Its principles were simple: respect for the ocean, respect for the land and for different cultures, and a harmonious relationship between surfers, and with nature. It was later adopted as the Surfer’s Code and is now promoted in different surfing magazines and by organizations such as the Surfriders Foundation, which fights for the protection of lakes, rivers, the ocean and the coastline.As the retro / future exhibition chose to focus on this, a few sustainable boards created with cardboard or wood, such as the Oareye surfboard or the Channelizer by Jam’in, rather than the highly-polluting technology that we use nowadays – polyester or epoxy resin – were shown. Two of the boards exposed were look-through, which is very interesting as a surfer can thus see the fish underneath him or her while surfing these boards. But many of the pieces showed a not-so-bright future, with a poisoned and radioactive sea or a surfer surfing on a sea of toy soldiers – some even showed greenish monsters (by Gérard Decoster) – all conveying the same message: we must stop polluting so much.  The one that marked me the most was the big cardboard sculpture of a polar bear (Melting Bear Statue by Pascal Peris), surrounded by a series of twenty drawings and a few oil paintings that told the bear’s story, alongside a TV showing the video of an actual polar bear struggling to escape a melting iceberg. In the drawings, the bear was surfing, imitating the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album, and while the style of the drawings reflected very well the vivacity and energy of surfing, the final message was really sad: the bear had died because of Global Warming. This creation really appealed to me.On a brighter note, many art pieces were “back to roots” creations, to emphasize the retro notion. For example, a few old surfboards were exposed, along with photos in black and white and paintings that looked as though they had just arrived from the 1970s. A surfboard made of vinyl records, plugged into a Marshall guitar amplifier (Surf Music, by Bruno Lehoux), stood out from the others, emphasizing the tight relationship between surfing and music – the Beach Boys, for example, can be considered the pioneers of “surf music”.Some objects, such as Fred Ménard’s Back from a surf session, show images that would be considered retro, had it not been for the particular technique that was used to create them. In Back from a surf session, the engravings are made by electrolysis, using aluminum slabs, wood, a phone charger and salted water. Indeed, the use of salted water to create these works is typical of the spirit of surfing.  Bernard Merli also used aluminum, folding it to create tiny sculptures showing surfers but clearly referring to an industrial environment. His sculpture Nose Riding, along with a few others, really embodied the notion of future of this exhibition. In the same way, an alaia – a thin, round-nosed and square-tailed surfboard with no ventral fin, directly inspired by the first Hawaiian boards – was exposed. It was made with new material and looked very thin; it did not really look surf-able.For the exhibition, Jean-Baptiste Frenove created small surf scenes made of cardboard and paper hidden in a suitcase; one had to look through the keyhole to see them. They represented mythical scenes in surf culture, and therefore the retro notion, yet, as they were placed in a suitcase, they added a notion of actuality: surfers travel more each year. This way they brought back to mind a gigantic longboard that could be separated in two and that was created twenty years ago to fit into a suitcase, so that it would be easy to take on a trip, but the idea was never developed further and the foldable surfboard stayed a chimera.This exhibition was very interesting on a cultural and artistic level, as it was beautiful and showed both famous and futuristic pieces, and was innovating from an environmental-point of view.Marie PittmanMaster 1 Anglais