Claude Viallat — Peintures récentes — Oniris — Rennes Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: June 27 → September 19, 2020

“… what matters is how the colours play with the colours underneath, how intuitively and in an unintended, unplanned way I manage to organize a surface in density, in intensity. »

Claude Viallat

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Regularly invited since 1990, he returns to the Oniris Gallery throughout the summer of 2020 for his tenth exhibition with his most recent works: small and large formats on canvas and paper in the gallery’s two spaces in Rennes.

Made famous by his works consisting of coloured prints, a form of sponge or horned bean arranged systematically on a wide variety of supports such as tarpaulins, tents, screens, parasols or umbrellas, Claude Viallat is exhibited in many French and foreign museums. This simple form, tirelessly reproduced with the help of a stencil and bent radiator brushes on coloured fabrics, induces its share of randomness through its manual execution. The repetition and arrangement of this motif, unique to the artist, creates diverse spaces, modulated according to the play of textures and colours of the supports that carry it.

Claude Viallat, 2018-345, 2018 Acrylique sur bâche — 120 × 230 cm

If one can see a kind of imprisonment in the tireless repetition of the same form, the artist finds his freedom in the choice of supports and colours, and on certain canvases, winks to the history of art appear, as shown, for example, in his tributes to Matisse.

A major figure in French painting, Claude Viallat represented France at the 1988 Venice Biennale. His works can be found in many public collections, including the Musée Nationale d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the MoMA in New York.