Claude Viallat

Sutures et Varia

Represented for twenty years by Galerie Templon, Claude Viallat, an iconic figure of French contemporary art, is taking over the vast space on Rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare for the first time with a radical exhibition that defies the codes of painting, volume and space.

Claude Viallat – Sutures et Varia, TEMPLON Paris, 2021
Claude Viallat – Sutures et Varia, TEMPLON Paris, 2021

A member and founding-member of the avant-garde Supports/Surfaces movement in the 1970s, Claude Viallat has established himself as a leading figure in French painting. For nearly half a century, he has spurned stretchers and canvases, instead painting on unstructured or juxtaposed textiles, endlessly repeating the same motif in a palette of shimmering colours.

Sutures and Varia offers a selection of works painted in the last two years. The new Sutures series, elaborated during the recent lockdowns, is anchored for the first time in a reflection on the notion of junction.

Fabrics with unusual contours and textures are assembled, as if “sutured” by strips of fabric with floral patterns. These sutures, simultaneously friezes and bandages, are laid loose, carefully folded, and assembled by the artist. The wall can be seen through their gaps, thus revealing the artifice of the combinations.

In Viallat’s work, intuition creates the canvas. The artist explains his approach: “I can never predict how the work will turn out, and even after several decades of artistic practice, I’m still surprised by the result. Yet I always accept it as it is. It is almost a human-to-human relationship I have with the work. I do what I can with it until it no longer wants me…”

Sans titre n°055

Details

  • Sutures et Varia
  • Sutures et Varia
  • Sutures et Varia
  • Sutures et Varia
  • Sutures et Varia

The artist

Claude Viallat was born in 1936 in Nimes, France, where he continues to live and work. He is one of the founders of the Supports/Surfaces movement in the 1970s, which called for art to renew itself through a deconstruction of traditional materials. Viallat started to work on industrial tarp, endlessly repeating the same abstract pattern, resembling a small bone, which became his signature. Stencilled repeatedly onto a range of supports, the pattern asks us to reflect on the meaning of the creative act and the status of the work of art.

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