Exposition
Claude Viallat
His neutral form that reminds of a sponge or a bean, Viallat’s signature for more than 50 years, has earned him worldwide recognition: retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, participation in the Venice Biennale, and acquisitions for the collections of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris and the MOMA in New York.
The French contemporary painter, Claude Viallat, was born in 1936 in Nîmes, where he lives and works today. As one of the founding members of the Supports/Surfaces painting group, the artist focuses primarily on the motif, repetition and process, rather than on the subject, which he places in the background, revolutionizing painting.
Viallat’s medium is free and heterogeneous. He works on diverse materials, found in flea markets, secondhand stores, attics. He paints on burlap bags, umbrellas, parasols, tablecloths, boat covers, tent covers, always deployed on the ground.
The artist’s creative process is all about the repetition of a simple and recurring form, immediately recognizable, on the entire surface of a canvas freed from its frame using the all-over technique. A remarkable colorist, Viallat uses bright color to apply the form that made him famous, “the simplest, most elementary, most immediate that is“, declined infinitely over the media.
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