Claude Viallat, et pourtant si...

OCTOBER 27, 2023 - MARCH 03, 2024

For the first time, Claude Viallat's hometown, where he has lived and worked for over 40 years, presents a large selection of his recent works, taking over the entire space of Carré d'art. Drawing on the nearby crucible of his Nîmes studio, the exhibition will showcase the generosity of Viallat's "numerous and spiraling" oeuvre, as the artist himself describes it.

A founding member of the Supports/Surfaces movement and a leading figure in French abstraction, Claude Viallat has tirelessly developed a body of work that is both immediately recognizable and constantly in motion. In addition to his paintings, the exhibition will feature a number of objects: somewhere between sculpture and chance assemblage, always precariously balanced but absolutely elegant, their playful simplicity is in constant dialogue with the intense formal and chromatic pleasure of his painting.

Empirical play with matter, the displaced revival of primitive gestures that hark back to the very origins of art and making, his work combines this ornamental and colorful impulse with the future past, drawing on the source of the first prehistoric artifacts as much as on the avant-gardes of the 1960s, practices from the four corners of the globe with a resolutely Mediterranean anchoring. The polychrome splendor of his work makes Claude Viallat one of the greatest colorists in history, combining an almost austere modesty of means with the graceful ingenuity of a creator of original forms. The subtle yet luxuriant sensuality of this ever-expanding body of work has never ceased to amaze, astonish and provoke thought and feeling for almost 60 years now.