Simon Hantai, Gebunden

Klappentext

Hantaï's last studio: discovering a modern myth.

The book features sixteen of Hantaï's dernier atelier ("last studio") paintings of 1982-85, distinguished by vibrantly colored abstract forms derived from a combination of folding and dripping techniques. Simon Hantaï (1922-2008) was the originator of the pliage (folding) technique, in which a canvas is crumpled and knotted, painted over, then spread out to reveal alternations between pigment and reserve. After representing France at the 1982 Biennale di Venezia, he withdrew from public life, declining to exhibit new work until 1998, and it was during this period that the last studio works were produced.

Anne Baldassari notes that Hantaï spent the period from 1960 to 1982 "seeking, as Pollock had, to attain a boundlessness of painting via the continuous expansion of its formats." The origin for this publication was Baldassari's extensive research into photographic portraits of Hantaï at work, taken by his close friend Édouard Boubat at the artist's own request. In the context of the last studio, Boubat's shots function as a guide to Hantaï's series and sub-series, revealing aspects of their development, chronology, and display. Hantaï did not show the last studio paintings during his lifetime, and their hybrid process and polychromic surfaces reflect the freedom from the restrictions of the art market and museum world that he enjoyed while laboring alone. The series has become, in Baldassari's words, "a modern myth," "an ecosystem in which painting seems to take on a life of its own, generating, endlessly and automatically, motifs, figures, sequences, syntagma, and systems."