Matisse Now

Stéphane Bordarier, Pierre Buraglio, Frédérique Lucien,

Pierre Mabille and Henri Matisse

 Galerie Jean Fournier is delighted to be presenting the exhibition Matisse Now, which brings together works on paper by Stéphane Bordarier, Pierre Buraglio, Frédérique Lucien and Pierre Mabille around a core offering of five original drawings by Henri Matisse. Revealing the kinship, acknowledged or indirect, between these artists and the Matisse oeuvre, the exhibition has been designed in resonance with the 10th Drawing Now salon. Exclusively devoted to contemporary drawing, the salon is held in Paris every spring. ([1])

Matisse Now comprises emblematic and in some cases hitherto unshown works by four artists individually tackling the « eternal conflict between drawing and colour ». Drawing is the underpinning of the Matisse oeuvre: he endlessly noted down what was around him – women, plants, interiors – and even drew into colour when he came up with the brilliant innovation of his cutouts. The five drawings chosen here testify to his sheer technical range and capacity for self-renewal: Indian ink, pencils, direct and more complex use of line, spatial saturation, light emanating from the white of the paper, and simplification sometimes bordering on the abstract.

Despite their radical differences, the exhibition’s four contemporary contributors find a natural unity in their assimilation of the Matisse canon. His influence, however, is integrated more as a state of mind – as a sensory relationship with the world.

From the early Masquages (Maskings) and Fenêtres (Windows) of the 1970s up to the present, Pierre Buraglio has maintained his own kind of link, at once ironic and respectful, with Matisse. The Dessins d’après (Drawings After) series is shot through with this inclusive, playful spirit. Buraglio is Matissian in his attachment to reality: that of his surroundings and his materials.

Frédérique Lucien’s suite IL (HE) betrays a similar relation to its models, while the series Feuiller (Breaking into Leaf) also addresses the notion of the decorative, combining grids and abstract motifs with solid-colour cutouts evocative of vegetal forms.

Paper can lend itself to colouring, slicing and tearing. The exhibition has provided Pierre Mabille with a pretext for new series of cutouts; while still recognisable, his characteristic shape is adroitly sabotaged by a system of coloured contrasts and counterforms. Stéphane Bordarier’s torn paper series interrogates the radical character of Matisse’s direct cutting into colour. In his paintings form hinges on a technical constraint, the drying time of glue mixed into pigment; here Bordarier contains form via the act of tearing.

Made up of « sidesteps » that include cutting-up, coloured material, models, the vegetal, line, and the work in progress, the exhibition raises the issue of contemporary reminiscences of the Matisse oeuvre. Through his inventiveness and observation of his daily life and immediate environment, Matisse achieved an unsurpassable universalism endlessly reconsidered by the artists of today.

(im)material, the new exhibition at Galerie Jean Fournier, brings together works by six artists: Pierre Buraglio, Simon Hantaï, Kacha Legrand, Jean Nanni, Michel Parmentier and Adrien Vescovi. It continues the programme begun with Almost Black and White in December 2013 and Outside the Box in the spring of 2014. These exhibitions are a point of intersection between some of Galerie Jean Fournier’s iconic artists and others who share the gallery’s involvement with painterly abstraction.

(im)material comprises works that make use of the properties of their materials – the density or fragility of fabric, tracing paper, wrapping paper, glassine, recycled envelopes – to reveal the picture space through simple acts: folding and unfolding, juxtaposition, assemblage and discolouration.

In France this combination of methods and materials has been crucial to the approach of many artists since the 1960s and movements like Supports-Surfaces and BMPT. The concerns of that period are now being reassessed. In this respect the oeuvre of Simon Hantaï (1922–2008) is seminal, in that it simultaneously challenges and proposes numerous painterly solutions, beginning with folding and unfolding: « Something happened through and in painting – line, form and colour brought together in a single act. »[1] Matisse blazed the trail with his cutouts of the 1940s and the ‘single act’ of combining painting, drawing and sculpture.

(im)material includes a Tabula by Simon Hantaï in which the regular folding sets up a vibration between the colour and the white of the canvas. Next to it, at once diaphanous and grave, a sober work on tracing paper by Michel Parmentier (1938-2000) combines opacity and transparency. Pierre Buraglio (b. 1939) reactivates an installation –envelopes unfolded and pinned in lines on the wall – already shown in the gallery in 1978 and at the Musée National d’Art Moderne’s Walls exhibition in 1981. Opened up, the envelopes reveal the blue of the paper inside them. The coloured shapes obtained by unfolding and tearing are orchestrated by the repetition of this basic act. This highly Matissean blue space is doomed to disappear in the course of its exposure to light. Buraglio, then, materialises an ephemeral coloured space, while Hantaï fixes it in time.

Jean Nanni (b. 1952), Kacha Legrand (b. 1960) and Adrien Vescovi (b. 1981) have adopted different stances in the wake of these approaches, with each of them paying particular attention to colour. Staggering, separation and juxtaposition render the coloured space concrete and more dense. To obtain this ‘palpable transparency’ Nanni, in a recent series, uses thick tracing paper and encaustic applied with a cloth. The translucency of the material in combination with the velvety character of the medium, seems to give added weight to the colour. In a previously unshown series from the 1980s, Kacha Legrand paints on assemblages of papers of different thicknesses and textures. Once pinned into place, these collages become integral parts of the wall. Adrien Vescovi creates monochrome paintings using fabric dyed, stretched and left out in the sun to change colour. The fabric is then placed on larger stretchers, revealing the marks of discolouration. As in Hantaï’s foldings, the colour effects obtained in this way structure the actual picture space.

The (im)material exhibition is intended as a conversation between works by tutelary figures – Hantaï, Parmentier, Buraglio – and other artists who continue to investigate the picture today or seek to transcend their materials so as to bring forth what is immaterial in painting.