About the artwork
On a pink and yellow background, Claude Viallat repeats green imprints four times, in the form of thick crosses. In this very joyful rendering, it is perceptible that the green Viallat uses becomes lighter as he applies the various crosses, as if he were not taking color from his matrix. While the stretcherless canvas allows him to go beyond the limits of traditional painting, his prints, inspired by a southern masonry process using lime, enable him to generate infinite variations. This repetition of motifs on free-standing canvas, which he has been reproducing unceasingly for 60 years, has become the artist's iconic trademark. A founding member of the Supports/Surfaces movement, Claude Viallat's practice challenges the traditional rules of the Beaux-Arts by focusing as much on the materials that make up the canvas as on its pictorial surface.
Expert opinion
This particularly cheerful and colorful work is typical of the motifs Claude Viallat used throughout his career. The matrix alone is a veritable manifesto for the Support Surfaces movement, of which he was one of the founders.
About the artist
Born in Nîmes in 1936, Claude Viallat is a contemporary French painter. Having studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier from 1955 to 1959, then at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris from 1962 to 1963, it was in 1966 that he adopted a process based on prints, marking the beginning of his distinctive artistic approach. His work is characterized by the use of a rounded, almost cross-shaped rectangle, which he repeats on stretcherless canvases. He draws his influence from the work of artists such as Matisse, Picasso, Simon Hantaï and Jackson Pollock, while criticizing lyrical abstraction. Claude Viallat is a founding member of the Supports/Surfaces group, which places equal importance on materials, the artist's gestures and the work itself. Claude Viallat has taught at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as well as in Marseille and Nîmes - where he served as director. His work has been exhibited in France, including a solo show at the Centre Pompidou in 1982, as well as abroad, at the Venice Biennale in 1988, where he represented France, and at the Buenos Aires Museum of Contemporary Art in 2022.
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