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The period was not, on the whole, one of optimism and joy, played out as it was against a background of economic crisis and the cold war. The tendency was rather towards disillusion, accompanied by a clear-sighted recognition that a stalemate between the generations would be unavoidable in the short term.

Paradoxically, as it would appear, a kind of hope and frenzied vitality could also be detected during these years. Both were fed by a sort of modernist utopia, which was sometimes wilfully ironic. This was largely based on a certain fascination with technical progress and, by extension, on a belief, tinged with mistrust, in the infinite perspectives that the new technologies now seemed to offer.

A whole section of France’s youth found itself confronted by the contradictions of the times it was living in: young people were torn between the sensation of living on the edge of an abyss and hope for the dawning of a new world; they were deprived of tangible ideological landmarks but resistant to the posthippy utopias of the previous generation. In search of an identity, they recognised themselves in the dark lyrics, the cold synthetic music and the laid-back attitude of the new groups bursting up all over the country, as much in the provinces as in Paris.

With the benefit of thirty years’ hindsight, the project "Des Jeunes Gens Mödernes" [Modern Young Men] (featuring an exhibition, a book and an audio compilation produced in conjunction with Naïve, as well as a documentary) reactivates this post-punk/novo diskö/French new & cold wave scene, by means of selected works, personal testimonies and documented records. One of the project’s ambitions is to highlight a cross-section of the specific creative diversity of this scene: it does so by engaging with the music it produced, but also with the aesthetics, the attitudes, and the recurring problems that developed in parallel, looking particularly at its relationship to the modern world. So, first and foremost, it is about recreating the atmosphere and spirit of the time through what was most characteristic about it (and sometimes what partook of caricature), rather than making an exhaustive list of what was produced during those years in the style that concerns us.

The project also aims to pinpoint the links that exist between that particular scene and present-day artistic creation. Multimedia by definition, the exhibition section thus contrasts various documents, artifacts and original works of the time with recent productions by contemporary plastic artists, musicians and video producers, whose work echoes, in one way or another, this particular sphere of influence of the French underground.

To discover at the galery : Marquis de Sade, Elli et Jacno, Artefact, Taxi Girl, Marie et les Garçons, Mathématiques Modernes, Etienne Daho, Lio, Suicide Roméo, Electric Callas, Modern Guy, Tokow Boys, Casino Music, Lizzy Mercier Descloux, Jad Wio, Kas Product, Edith Nylon, Metal Boys/Metal Urbain, Charles de Goal, Messageros Killers Boys, Norma Loy, Guerre Froide, A 3 dans les W.C.… entre autres!

galerie du jour agnès b., Paris, april 2008, photos by Laura Morsch