Supports-Surfaces
Supports/Surfaces is an artistic movement of the early 1970s that was one of the founding groups of contemporary French art, both in painting and sculpture. Supports/Surfaces played a pivotal role in the development of French formalism and has since become influential in the work of young painters in the United States.[1]
Movement
Founding
Supports/Surfaces had its beginnings in the south of France, in cities like Montpellier, Nîmes and Nice where most of the group’s earliest members lived and worked..[2]
The group's first exhibition, "Painting in question" took place at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris in March–April 1969, with works by Alocco, Dezeuze, Dolla, Pagès, Pincemin, Saytour, Viallat[3]
In June 1969, during an exhibition at the museum of Le Havre entitled "The painting in question", Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Patrick Saytour, and Claude Viallat wrote in the catalog:
"The object of painting is painting itself, and the paintings on display relate only to themselves. They do not appeal to an "elsewhere" (the personality of the artist, his biography, the history of art, for example). They offer no escape, because the surface, by the ruptures of shapes and colors that are operated there, prohibits the mental projections or the dreamlike ravings of the spectator. Painting is a fact in itself and it is on its grounds that one must pose the problems. It is not a question of a return to the sources, nor of the search for an original purity, but of the simple exposure of the pictorial elements which constitute the pictorial fact. Hence the neutrality of the works presented, their absence of lyricism and expressive depth. "
On the formal level, Claude Viallat summarizes their work: "Dezeuze painted canvas-less frames, I painted canvas without frames and Saytour, the image of the frame on the canvas."
The group's first exhibition as Support-Surface took place from September to October of 1970 at A.R.C in Paris with Boules, Devade, Dezeuze, Saytour, Valensi, and Viallat.
The group later changed their name from Support-Surface to Supports/Surfaces.
Style
Supports/Surfaces is characterized by an approach that gives equal importance to materials, creative gesture, and the final work. The subject takes second place.
Starting in 1966, they begin to question the traditional support: Buraglio recovers pieces of canvas and window elements which he assembles.
Dezeuze dissociates the canvas from the frame. Viallat uses salvaged materials, tarpaulins, umbrellas, various fabrics, and knotted or braided rope. He remains faithful to these media to this day.
Bernard Pagès and Toni Grand work on wood and ropes. Jaccard uses knotted ropes to print their prints on the canvas, which he exhibits alongside the ropes that served as tools.
Rouan paints two canvases that he cuts and braids together. As for Saytour, he revisits folding as a technique.
Pincemin and Viallat repeat the same motif. Cane uses stamps and Viallat applies color to stencils. Meurice and Viallat use artisanal dyes.
All these practices speak to a desire to return to a sort of reductive and essential art practice. These reflections were preceded, beginning in 1955 in Japan, by the avant-garde movement Gutai. Simultaneously, comparable research on the question of the work and the creative process developed in the late 1960s, especially in the context of American minimal art, or the Italian Arte Povera.
The Supports/Surfaces Movement
Supports/Surfaces was an ephemeral movement: the first exhibition was held in 1969 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. It brought together artists who highlighted the practice of painting and questioned its most fundamental components. Artist, Joe Fyfe described the theory of the group as follows:
"The group perceived the painting philosophically, politically and phenomenologically, as an object that participated in the ongoing reproduction of already existing societal conditions and must be dismantled as such, as a symbol of the fabric of society and as a qualitative entity that need not be theatricalized by the white cube of the gallery space."[4]
Questioning traditional pictorial means, these artists combined this questioning with theoretical reflection and political positioning in the journal Peinture-Cahiers théoriques. Dissent arose between the members of the group, causing them to split in 1972.
Supports/Surfaces can be considered to be the last, albeit late, French avant-garde movement in the history of modernity and a definitive close to this cycle.
Legacy
Following this phase of mixing ideas, each artist moved in directions ranging from free figuration to abstract expressionism. In 1974 the Musée d’Art et d’ Industrie in Saint-Etienne mounted a show called “Nouvelle Peinture en France pratiques/théories.” Most of the former members of Supports/Surfaces were included, with the notable exception of Cane and Devade, who refused to participate. By looking at the group as a discrete historical moment, the 1974 retrospective made it clear that the members had by then come to the termination of Supports/Surfaces’s collective journey. In March 1991, 17 years later, another show in the same city, organized by the same museum director, once again reunited the group.[2]
Since the beginning of 2001, the Centre Pompidou has devoted an entire space (room 11, level 4) to the Supports/Surfaces group.
The work of Supports/Surfaces has made a recent resurgence in the United States after the discovery of 1960s and 70s works by U.S. artists who shared similar artistic influences and theories as the French group[5]. Supports/Surfaces has since been the subject of various exhibitions including a 2014 show at Canada Gallery, followed by one at Paul Rogers Gallery in 2015.
Artists
Supports / Surfaces has officially brought together the following twelve painters or sculptors, mostly from the south of France:
- André-Pierre Arnal (born in Nîmes in 1939)
- Vincent Bioulès (born in Montpellier in 1938)
- Louis Cane (born in Beaulieu-sur-Mer in 1943)
- Marc Devade[6] (Paris 1943 – id. 1983)
- Daniel Dezeuze (born in Alès in 1942)
- Noël Dolla (born in Nice in 1945)
- Toni Grand (Gallargues, 1935 - Mouriès 2005)
- Bernard Pagès (born in Cahors in 1940 )
- Jean-Pierre Pincemin (Paris, 1944 - Arcueil, 2005)
- Patrick Saytour (born in Nice in 1935)
- André Valensi (born in Paris in 1947)
- Claude Viallat (born in Nîmes in 1936)
Other artists, on the margins of the group, nevertheless participated in this movement through their artistic practice:
- Marcel Alocco (born in Nice in 1937)
- Pierre Buraglio (born in Maisons-Alfort in 1939)
- Christian Jaccard (born in Fontenay-sous-Bois in 1939)
- Jean-Michel Meurice (born in Lille in 1938)
- François Rouan (born in Montpellier in 1943)
Notes and References
- ↑ Dezeuze, Daniel (2011). Dictionnaire de Supports/Surfaces. Ceysson Editions d'Art. pp. 142–144. ISBN 978-2-9163-7338-6. Search this book on
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Rubinstein, Raphael (February 1, 2004). "The Painting Undone: Supports/Surfaces". Artcritical.
- ↑ A mimeographed flyer at the initiative of Jean Clair, June 14, 1971 at the National Theater of Nice, takes "act of the disintegration of the Support-Surface Group" and draws the chronological list of exhibitions. The leaflet is signed by Noël Dolla, Tony Grand, Patrick Saytour, André Valensi and Claude Viallat.
- ↑ Supports/Surfaces: A Moment/A Movement. Ceysson Éditons d'Art. 2014. p. 5. ISBN 978-2-91-6373-71-3. Search this book on
- ↑ Rubinstein, Raphael (September 3, 2014). "Theory and Matter". Art in America.
- ↑ View l'hommage à Marc Devade [archive] by Philippe Sollers.
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