Serpentine Gallery, London
From military operations to the death of André Breton, the Parisian artist loved to paint seismic events. But it’s odd and themeless, proving nothing dates more badly than pop art
You can’t accuse the Serpentine of relentlessly reciting liberal orthodoxies. One of the biggest paintings in its retrospective of work by Hervé Télémaque celebrates conservative Jacques Chirac’s landslide victory in the 2002 French presidential election. It’s a carnival of democracy with caricatures of Chirac from Le Monde. At the bottom of the jovial canvas, however, are figures appropriated from a painting about lynchings by the great African-American artist Jacob Lawrence. And there’s the sombre undertow. Chirac’s rival for the Élysée Palace was National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. That’s what made the victory so sweet, even if you were not a conservative, but also threaded with anxiety.
I was neither cheered nor worried by this sadly irrelevant work of art. It does not make recent history come alive. That’s the trouble with painting. A canvas from centuries ago can be devastatingly immediate, while one done the other day can be a dusty relic. I’m not sure if the 2002 election is remembered all that much even in France. And this is a fairly recent event by the standards of Télémaque’s art. US military activities in the 1960s and the death of André Breton are among the stories this Parisian pop artist tells. Nothing dates more badly than pop art. Most of its practitioners are museum artists now, lost in time. Who wants yesterday’s papers?