Supports/Surfaces Featuring Claude Viallat, André-Pierre Arnal, Marc Devade, Noël Dolla, Daniel Dezeuze, Jean-Michel Meurice, Bernard Pagès, Patrick Saytour
Curated by Bernard Ceysson
at Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles
until March 24, 2017

 

Supports/Surfaces is one of the major avant-garde groups of 60s and 70s France. The artworks made by these artists are breathtaking, and resonate as deeply today as they did when they were first made

Yes indeed. And Claude Viallat is the most significant one. “Supports/Surfaces” means that all the artists who belong to the movement have vowed to not use traditional support such as canvases or paper surrounded with frames as well as not using traditional surface such as a landscape painted or whatever traditional subject.

 

French Painter, Claude Viallat was born in 1936 in Nimes, France. After the art school Les Beaux Arts (Montpellier & Paris) he abandons figuration in his paintings in order to explore that neutral form he will use for ever since. In 1969 he creates the movement Supports/Surfaces.

 

By using systematically that specific shape, Claude Viallat -who is by the way pretty good at drawing- Claude Viallat has excluded the subject from the act of painting to better focus on the major possibilities color and paint might offer on their own.

The result is a whole career studying the relationship between the colors on different materials such as fishing nets, military tarpaulins or whatever materials he could find to serve his purpose.

 

 

Viallat’s work major in the field of painting. It is as big as the Cubism with Picasso. It is time to celebrate Claude Viallat for his major contribution to the Arts. This is what Cherry and Martin attempt successfully to contribute to.

Beatrice Chassepot