In November 2015, PIASA asked René-Julien Praz to conceive a sale devoted to emerging artists from the Los Angeles scene. The artists selected – whether established or cutting-edge – reflect a generation, era and culture that have inspired many of their contemporaries in recent years.

The emerging L.A. art scene shown for the first time in France

“Once I'd thought of the title, Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic L.A., nothing could seem more fitting. The sheer wealth of images that these words evoke portrays with surgical precision the pathos of this mythical city, where glamour meets vulgarity and highbrow culture, the mainstream. Only in L.A. could kitsch rub shoulders with the sublime and seduction with repulsion: this city truly is a world of contrasts.

The struggles, clashes, hopes, ambitions and despair of millions of immigrants are an integral part of the city's DNA. The city is built from their blood and tears as they fought and won their place in this multi-cultural Eldorado, facing lies and duplicity with courage, commitment, intelligence and solidarity, to finally be able to live together, whatever their colour or origin: Mexican, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Iranian... In this great melting pot, the religious - Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Buddhists and Muslims – live alongside agnostics and atheists on these lands of the American Far West.

Jake Elliot's 2014 short story, Bloody Red Sun of Fantastic L.A., took its title from the lyrics of his favourite Doors' song (a band which also started out in Los Angeles) and he explains just how appropriate the title seemed to him and how it went way beyond the face value of the words themselves. “Los Angeles, the City of Angels, where the Sun is the closest star and Hollywood the city of stars. My story takes place in the heart of this world.”

In 2006, the Centre Pompidou in Paris presented a grandiose exhibition: Los Angeles 1955-1985: The birth of an art capital, which documented, for near enough the first time in France, the cultural wealth of this city. A city of images: outrageous and elusive, open, generous and above all indefinable, seeing the extent to which this metropolis flirts with the very limits of what is possible.

As Bruno Racine (president of the Centre Pompidou from 2002 to 2005) explained at the time: “It was high time to show the European public the importance and the specificity of a city that had been the birthplace of such a broad scope of art and which had, for so long, lived in the shadow of its rival, New York.”

Artistic creation today in Los Angeles is seen as a model, an alternative scene that retrospectively transforms our perception of American art, by taking it beyond the theoretical and structural frameworks of identified movements. Reminiscent of its urban model, which is noteworthy by its uniqueness, its immensity and multi-cultural dimension, L.A.'s art stands out by its protean nature and a proactive dynamic that means it is in constant renewal.

Auction: November 9, 2015

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