Jean Degottex — Bernard Bouche Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: February 7 → March 23, 2013

The gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition with Jean Degottex’s major works. For this exhibition, we have chosen only one period, lines-report, which is one of the most intensif for us.

Degottex began to detach the lyric abstraction from 1955, of which he was one of the major figures. He abandoned little by little the color and took interest in sign, in writing which only exists through the gesture based on deep meditation in search of empty. He seemed to have found the notion of empty in the doctrine of zen. Gradually, writing disappeared and gave place to line and trait, in order to have more simplicité and the absolute gesture. He summarized the work of a painter is to discharge the paint onto the canvas until exhaustion. Canvas, brush, paint, gesture, everything is naked.Therefore, Degottex had never stop experimenting new processes. The act of painting came to be replaced by that of tearing, cutting, braiding, folding … Degottex gave away the brush for some more incisive tools such as cutter or screwdriver. He also used the brush and the brick to rubbing the upside-down linen canvas, using the back of a long canvas reduced to a single front. In the series of lines-report, by a complex system of folding and pasting, the distribution of black paint and various glue skin produces different values ​​of black and diverse effects of materials. Dullness, opacity, brightness, black is never uniform. The paintings are streaked by horizontal lines using a screwdriver that will scratch the material.

These lines reveal the texture of linen. Because Degottex worked on canvas previously folded, the lines automatically defer a component to another canvas. Deeply engraved on one side of canvas, they splash on the surface on other sides, exposing a variety of textures. Behind the apparent simplicity of horizontal lines, a subtle game of transfering the materials and the prints by stamping animates the entire surface of painting.