Avec et sans peinture

Over the course of the last century, photography and cinema dealt painting a blow without quite managing to kill it off. Now, at a time when the likes of Gerhard Richter model paintings on photos and Bill Viola effectively builds canvases from video, there's a strong case to be made for the renaissance of painting – albeit as one element in a new, syncretic kind of visual art.

Redefining painting is at the core of this, the MAC/VAL's sixth exhibition of its collections. As can be expected from this forward-thinking contemporary gallery, the works on display here show scant regard for the 'rules' of painting – many of them, as the show's name implies, don't even use paint. Wood, photos and neon tubes provide the raw material; cheap artworks are daubed with emulsion; and in a mammoth work centred on four Palestinian women the conventions of portrait art are boldly subverted. The art of painting is never banished – it's merely turned on its head. Few Parisian galleries tackle discourses in contemporary art with the relish and intelligence of MAC/VAL. Their latest doesn't disappoint.