Claude Viallat

French painter Claude Viallat was born in 1936 in Nîmes where he lives and works

He has been exhibiting at the Oniris gallery since 1990

The colours bring to life "the" shape of Claude Viallat, which has become his signature and an immediate sign of recognition. Since the 1970s, it has been at the centre of each creation, and is part of an alternation of shapes with suggested contours and full forms, applied to supports impregnated with the vagaries of time and places they have encountered. This formal repetition opens the doors to an infinite exploration of the possibilities that colour and the materials used can offer.

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

Born in 1936, Claude Viallat is one of the founders of Supports-Surfaces, an artistic avant-garde movement that emerged in the early 1970s. This ephemeral movement challenged traditional pictorial means. Bringing together Vincent Bioulès, Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Jean-Pierre Pincemin and Noël Dolla, among others, this movement, which was both theoretical and political, called for a renewal of art by questioning traditional materials such as canvas and stretchers.

Viallat thus began to work on industrial tarpaulins, free of all frames, on which he repeated the same abstract form over and over again. This "shape", which can evoke in turn an ossicle or a hand, has over time become his signature. Repeated with stencils, in a variety of colours and on various supports (upholstery, carpets, recycled materials), this motif, which annihilates the notion of "subject", allows Claude Viallat to reflect on the meaning of the creative gesture and the status of "work of art".

It is crouched, on a support that is spread out on the floor, that Claude Viallat poses his brilliant acrylic paintings. He draws his inspiration and working posture from the early and often non-Western arts. The artist, more attached to the process that form generates than to the form itself, has maintained this unique system for five decades of painting.

His obstinacy is also evident in the fact that he persists, even today, in pursuing this search for complexity in abstraction in an infinite game, while others have long since given up.