Paintings 2013 – 2016

Galerie Jean Fournier is pleased to be presenting a new solo exhibition by Jean François Maurige, devoted exclusively to paintings.

Since the 1980s Jean François Maurige has been making pictures according to an established but evolving set of rules. At the Marché Saint-Pierre textile market in Paris he buys offcuts of red fabric not actually intended for paintings, rather than the traditional linen canvas. He staples his fabric to the wall, then primes it by brushing it down vertically with very dilute white acrylic. The prepared canvas is laid on the floor. The canvas is then stretched and paint is applied in tones varying from orange-red to violet, from which emerge shapes – « figures », the artist calls them – to be worked on. Omnipresent as colour and substance, red is one of the essential components of Maurige’s work, and is sometimes conceptualised as a non-colour. The artist’s attachment to red in his paintings hinges on its combination of graphic and chromatic effectiveness.

Maurige feels he had no choice about this colour. For him red is not simply a surface: it has its own material character, its own depth. In the course of time it has become the actual subject of his pictures. By appropriating it in this way he hopes to free it of such obvious connotations as blood, life and death.

The exhibition comprises a group of pictures painted between 2013 and 2016. In the more recent works we detect a change of approach: the red shapes seem lighter, forming spirals that energise the picture as they hover against the ground of the canvas. While more assertive, this ground is less colour-saturated. Form and gesture are liberated. We also find these arabesques as a repetitive motif filling the artist’s sketchbooks.

Another group of pictures is composed of canvases bearing slanting lines. Already present in his pictures from the 2000s, these lines have changed colour: no longer red – or black, as in the paintings on paper – they range from blue to violet.

The spirited presentation alternates large and small works hung at different heights – a reprise of the method Maurige has been experimenting with in his studio. New to Galerie Fournier, this mode of exhibition was tried out by the artist at the 2015 edition of L’art dans les Chapelles (Art in Chapels) in Brittany.

]]> http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/jean-francois-maurige-fournier/feed/ 0 http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/maurige-fournier/ http://www.galleriesinparis.com/exhibitions/maurige-fournier/#comments Sat, 20 Apr 2013 08:23:02 +0000 Galleries http://www.galleriesinparis.com/?p=2344 Why Red
Galerie Jean Fournier is delighted to be presenting three groups of works by Jean François Maurige – paintings on canvas, paintings on paper, ceramics – in an exhibition allowing for comparison and association of these different media.
Maurige’s practice is rooted in a determination to confront the issue of the picture by using deliberately chosen constraints to establish a painterly economy. The picture is the site for the self-generation of what it is going to offer the eye: the construction of a space of freedom, a referential space to be created and appropriated. This appropriation is given concrete form via the gradual instituting of a protocol.
Since the 1980s Maurige has been producing his pictures according to a well established, evolving set of rules. Opting for a red fabric rather than the traditional linen, he staples his canvas to the wall, then primes it with very dilute, vertically brushed white acrylic. Once ready the canvas is laid on the floor and by frottage the artist introduces a broad vertical strip of black. Now comes red paint, in tones varying from orange to purple, out of which emerge the shapes he calls ‘figures’. As one of the essential components of his work, the constant presence of red as colour and texture is sometimes conceptualised as non-colour. Maurige’s fondness for red springs from his appreciation of both its graphic and chromatic effectiveness.
In the first group of pictures in the exhibition the red shapes seem – in continuity with their predecessors – to be moving, as if trying to break out. However, the black mark still visible in the preceding works has now vanished from the protocol.
This out-of-field notion is even more pronounced in the series of paintings on Canson paper. Slanting black lines intersect with a line of red or blue which throws the whole work off-centre. Both sides of the paper are coated with paint, as if the artist were trying to unite the two areas of solid colour separated by the thickness of the sheet. ‘While this interweaving of strips produces a highly structured effect that can seem the opposite of what is to be seen in the works on canvas, it obeys a similar principle of adjustment of the picture plane to spatial reality.1
The third and last group comprises a series of ceramics made in the Maine region, and in Betschdorf and Quimper. Here the artist addresses such traditional techniques as the use of blue in the pottery of Alsace. Once again the use of repetitive motifs – which already proliferate in his sketchbooks – is another way for the artist to express the infinite space of the red canvas he paints on.
For Jean François Maurige the picture is the most relevant possible response to the issue of the visible; and it is activated as much through the practice of his paintings as of that of his paintings on paper and his ceramics. Each of these practices is a link in a chain that moves into the field of the picture, enabling interruptions, fresh starts, reprises and the summoning up of different forms.
The exhibition will be accompanied by an opuscule designed by the artist.
1 Patrick Javault in Jean François Maurige: tableaux 1982-1984 tableaux 2007-2010, Editions Lienart & Galerie
Jean Fournier, 2011, p.132.