Jean François Maurige — Tableaux 2013-2016 — Jean Fournier Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 28 → May 28, 2016

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting a new solo exhibition by Jean François Maurige, devoted exclusively to paintings.

Since the 1980s Jean François Maurige has been making pictures according to an established but evolving set of rules. At the Marché Saint-Pierre textile market in Paris he buys offcuts of red fabric not actually intended for paintings, rather than the traditional linen canvas. He staples his fabric to the wall, then primes it by brushing it down vertically with very dilute white acrylic. The prepared canvas is laid on the floor. The canvas is then stretched and paint is applied in tones varying from orange-red to violet, from which emerge shapes — "figures", the artist calls them — to be worked on. Omnipresent as colour and substance, red is one of the essential components of Maurige’s work, and is sometimes conceptualised as a non-colour. The artist’s attachment to red in his paintings hinges on its combination of graphic and chromatic effectiveness.

Maurige feels he had no choice about this colour. For him red is not simply a surface: it has its own material character, its own depth. In the course of time it has become the actual subject of his pictures. By appropriating it in this way he hopes to free it of such obvious connotations as blood, life and death.

The exhibition comprises a group of pictures painted between 2013 and 2016. In the more recent works we detect a change of approach: the red shapes seem lighter, forming spirals that energise the picture as they hover against the ground of the canvas. While more assertive, this ground is less colour-saturated. Form and gesture are liberated. We also find these arabesques as a repetitive motif filling the artist’s sketchbooks.

Another group of pictures is composed of canvases bearing slanting lines. Already present in his pictures from the 2000s, these lines have changed colour: no longer red — or black, as in the paintings on paper — they range from blue to violet.

The spirited presentation alternates large and small works hung at different heights — a reprise of the method Maurige has been experimenting with in his studio. New to Galerie Fournier, this mode of exhibition was tried out by the artist at the 2015 edition of L’art dans les Chapelles (Art in Chapels) in Brittany.

The gallery will be closed on 6th and 7th May 2016.

As part of Choices Collectors Weekend a round table is taking place at Galerie Fournier on Saturday 21 May at 4:00 pm in conjunction with the “Archives rêvées, mémoire de peintre” project organised by Labex Arts H2H in association with MACC in Fresnes, the AIAC laboratory at Université de Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, the Archives Nationales in Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, and the Bernard Ceysson and Bernard Jordan galleries in Paris. Participants: artists Jean François Maurige and Christophe Cuzin and art historian Romain Mathieu. Moderator: Céline Leturcq.