Le Prix du Frac Bretagne-Art Norac aims to support the professional development of the Brittany artistic scene at the international level. The award is a Frac Bretagne initiative supported by Art Norac, the sponsorship association of the Norac group.
With the support of :
Le Prix du Frac Bretagne–Art Norac
Brittany is one of the richest regions in France in the visual arts sector. Its large pool of artists is supported by a committed network of actors and venues throughout the territory. But even if there are plenty of opportunities for artists to produce, exhibit and have their work collected, the development of their practice at the international level remains a challenge.
Frac Bretagne and Art Norac have been engaged in the construction of the artistic landscape in Brittany for a long time, with the goal of revealing the artistic talents and initiatives present within the region in the context of contemporary national and international artistic scenes.
In 2020, Frac Bretagne and Art Norac have chosen to join forces in their engagement with local artists by creating the Frac Bretagne–Art Norac Award. The goal of the award is to help bring artists active in the region to the international scene, in order to promote the professionalisation of their journey beyond the borders of France.
Each year, a partner structure in Europe or the rest of the world that is prepared to welcome an artist living and working in Brittany to produce a personal exhibition will be associated with the program.
Elisa Florimond
Born in 1995, lives and works in Aubervilliers.
Her art studies began with a BTS in industrial ceramics at Olivier de Serres (Paris). She then followed a double degree course at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris and the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, from which she graduated in 2021.
In 2020, she took part in the exhibition Un plus grand lac at the Magasins généraux (Pantin). She exhibits at Galerie Mansart and the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Paris, 2021). In 2022, with the Emploi fictif curatorial collective, she presents her first solo show Mains-bêtes at the Confort mental gallery (Paris). Her installations étendue 01 and 02 were presented at Poush (Aubervilliers) in 2022 and at the Onde art center (Vélizy-Villacoublay, 2023). In 2024, she presented her solo exhibition systèmes complexes at the Grand Huit gallery in Nantes. In 2025, she takes the Generator training course, which culminates in the Connecting the dots exhibition at 40mcube in Rennes.
Oppose classifications with constellations. On one side, clearly separated and hierarchical categories; on the other, a continuum of resonances and correspondences between entities that are, a priori, distant from one another. These are two conceptions of the world: the first inherited from Western modernity, which Elisa Florimond dissolves into the second, inspired by contemporary currents of thought. Named under the generic title of ‘extensions’, her installations are composed of boxes and pedestals evocative of archaeological and natural history museum display cases, inside or on the surface of which are three-dimensional or two-dimensional reproductions of prehistoric or ancient art objects in human or animal form. Thus, fixed to the walls or placed on the floor, these display devices borrow from the codes of taxonomy to introduce systems of connections between different realms, times and spaces. The artist’s ‘extensions’ thus present themselves as microcosms that are both coherent and open to all kinds of ramifications. Here, emotional and imaginary associations unfold, escaping analytical rationality, as if intertwined on the processes of memory and creation. Processes during which things and their representations change scale, mingle and infuse one another, as unstable and malleable as the soap from which hands are carved – placed alongside copies of artefacts or photographic reproductions. Often associated with grasping, even domination, the hand here becomes soft and caressing, a surface of contact between oneself and the other.
Text by Sarah Ihler-Meyer
The Elisa Florimond’s work will be exhibited as a solo exhibition at the Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, Sweden in June 2026.
Tania Gheerbrant
Born in 1994, lives and works in Quimper and Courtils.
She graduated from EESAB – site de Rennes in 2014, then from ENSBA-Paris in 2017. Her art, based on long-term research and forms of co-creation, mainly takes the form of installations, videos and editions.
Her work has been shown in various group exhibitions in institutions, including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2024); Bally Foundation, Lugarno, Switzerland (2023); Chapelle des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2022); 66e Salon de Montrouge (2022); Point Commun, Annecy (2021); Fondation Fiminco, Romainville (2021); Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris (2021); Panacée MoCo, Montpellier (2019); La villa Radet, Paris (2019); or The Other Art Fair, Turin, Italia (2018).
Tania Gheerbrant focusses on the question of the norm in mental health, and in particular in what psychiatry calls auditory ‘hallucination’. Rather than seeing this disorder as a mere symptom, she sees it as an expanded perception of the world.
For the past two years, Tania Gheerbrant has been working with the ‘Réseau des Entendeurs de Voix’ (REV), a community founded in the Netherlands in 1988 and active in France since 2011. The REV enables people to share their experiences and tame their voices without resorting to confinement or medication. These talking circles aim for collective ‘recovery’. The artist’s research comes at a time when staff shortages in hospitals are forcing the use of isolation rooms and the proliferation of psychotropic treatments.
In the exhibition, she is displaying a large fresco that recomposes the words and images of the newsletter Gardes Fous, founded by psychiatrists and patients in Paris in 1974, and the Canadian fanzine In a Nutshell, created by a patients’ association in 1971.
The artist is also presenting the film Twin in the Clouds and Other Stories, in which she brings together testimonies about the understanding of voices and recovery. An actor replaces the interviewee when anonymity requires it; a cabaret singer covers a Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine song rewritten by the artist; poems composed over fifty years ago, read by a hearing person and his mother, echo in the forest.
Ilan Michel
The Tania Gheerbrant’s work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria in May 2025.
Céline Le Guillou
Céline Le Guillou
Born in 1994, lives and works in Quimper and Courtils.
Céline Le Guillou studied at the ESAAA in Annecy, then at the EESAB-site de Quimper where she obtained her diploma in 2018. Attentive to what happens in the studio, to the act of creation as such, her approach is underpinned by the attention given to the materials she uses. She then perfected her skills in clay techniques at the European Institute of Ceramic Arts in the Haut-Rhin. She continued with several exhibition projects, including the residency programme Les Chantiers at Passerelle centre d’art contemporain in Brest and the Minoterie21 residency in Morbihan.
Earth is an infinite source of inspiration, which, fortunately, millennia of creation have still not dried up. It was there, it seems, before anything else, and will remain there, after all. Céline Le Guillou has taken that into account. If they’re going to live together for a long time, they might make sure it’s a pleasant one.
So, with her two curious and passionate hands, she massages her beloved earth, feeling it, cradling it and examining it, brooding over it and raising the temperature until she finds the one that suits her best. On the ground, the earth swarms in small, smooth mounds that borrow their shapes from clouds, weights or a loaf of bread, just as ready to soar to the heavens as to anchor itself firmly to the ground or fill our stomachs. On the walls, it mixes with water, transforms into paint, liquid, vaporous, as if to signify the states it can take on when it is quietly withdrawn into its kiln, waiting for the artist to come and retrieve it.
The earth is an infinite source of mystery, and Céline Le Guillou has an insatiable appetite for it. And the two meet with delight. The earth contains a little of everything that surrounds it, inhabits it and covers it for the duration of this pleasant cohabitation. It is these spontaneous and almost magical inputs and components that the artist strives to catalogue as she manipulates, in order to find the recipe that will link the familiar and the unknown in a true place of her own.
Horya
Horya Makhlouf, art critic, cultural mediator and art historian
Céline Le Guillou will be in residence at the Instituto Inclusartiz in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in March and April 2024. At the end of this residency, her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition.
Fanny Gicquel
Born in 1992, lives and works in Rennes.
Graduated from EESAB-Rennes in 2018, Fanny Gicquel is a 2021 winner of the Marfa Prize. In addition, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hua International gallery in Berlin (2021), at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain in Brest (2020) and at The left right Place in Reims (2020). She has participated in the group exhibitions Art Souterrain in Montreal (2021), the 10th Prix de la Jeune Création de Saint-Rémy (2021) and Nanjing International Art Fair in China (2020).
Fanny Gicquel develops moving and fine environments within which the viewer’s body is invited to move. Her installations appear as microcosms in which the different elements maintain mutually interdependent relationships.
Whether placed on the floor or hanging from the ceiling, Fanny Gicquel’s objects, made of glass, metal or textile, are an invitation to the touch and aim to create a form of intimacy with the viewer. Her artworks therefore exist in two phases: contemplation and manipulation, allowing her to explore the border between the animate and the inanimate.
This also manifests through experimentation with changing materials such as paraffin and heat sensitive paint that escape a final form, evoking impermanence and the multiplicity of things that surround us.
The installations are always accompanied by scenarios of activation, imagined by the artist and executed by performers. They interact with the objects in a discrete or sometimes almost unnoticeable manner, until they create images close to a living painting, which invites to slow down and contemplate.
For her new installation at Frac Bretagne, the artist draws the outline of a moving and transitory landscape, occupied by sculptures which enter into a direct relationship with the architecture of the venue hosting them. Harmoniously displayed in the space, the artworks create a new synergy, allowing the different materials to subtly communicate with each other and to interact with the viewer’s body.
Elena Cardin, curator of the exhibition
Fanny Gicquel presents a solo exhibition at the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios (TBG+S) in Dublin, Ireland from May to July 2023.
Corentin Canesson
Born in 1988, lives and works in Brest and Paris.
Graduated from EESAB-Rennes in 2011, he participated to the 21st Prize of Fondation d’entreprise Ricard Le Fil d’Alerte. He has presented solo exhibitions at Sator gallery in Paris (2020), at Nathalie Obadia gallery in Paris (2018), at Crédac – Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry-sur- Seine (2017) and at Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain in Brest (2015).
Corentin Canesson practices painting as one would cover a music standard. Well aware of the medium’s history, he simultaneously works on abstract and figurative canvases, playing with resurgence of more or less confessed or hidden references to the paintings of Bram Van Velde or Philip Guston.
The “figures” inhabiting these series are to be understood here in the sense of “pretexts” to (continue to) paint. Whether the lyrics of a song by Yo La Tengo, the color of a book cover, a bird with a long beak are often the starting point for long series. Never really completed, the series continue to develop over the years, incorporating variables such as the format of the canvas or the exhibition budget.
For Mauve Zone (exhibition of the nominees of the Frac Bretagne-Art Norac Award 2021), paintings made between 2010 and 2017 are displayed side by side along with canvases freshly painted on site, within a triple line. This display lacking unit of time or chronology is like an “ongoing retrospective” highlighting the strange permanence that operates whithin the work of Corentin Canesson where the oldest paintings are regularly brought into play, where abstract series closely rub shoulders with figurative works. As a space porous to music, Corentin Canesson’s pictorial work goes hand in hand with his practice as a guitarist in the experimental rock band The Night He Came Home. Without defined contours, this band constitutes another collaborative space to record and perform alongside other artists.
Corentin Canesson presents a solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas, USA from January 28 to March 12, 2022..
Art Norac, the award’s sponsor
Art Norac is an organization dedicated to the patronage of the arts, led by the agri-food group Norac. Founded in 2005 by Bruno Caron, Norac’s chairman and founder, the organization supports contemporary creation and participates in its dissemination to the general public and to employees of Norac group companies. For the Norac group, Art Norac provides a mean to actively participate in society and to develop its social responsibility in Rennes, where its head
office has been located for many years. Art Norac notably supports various contemporary art initiatives and actors in Rennes and Brittany (Master MAE, 40mcube, the Archives of Art Criticism…).
Image : Visuel : Johanna Cartier © Nina Medioni / Elisa Florimond © Esteban-Neveu / Andréa Le Guellec © Nadine Le Guellec / Maxime Voidy © Mélanie Passe