Claude Viallat

Claude Viallat - 2010/112

Technique: Acrylic on postal bag

Artist Biography: Claude Viallat was born in 1936 in the city of Nimes, where he still lives and works today. He was the main driving force behind what is considered the last great avant-garde movement in France: Support Surfaces (1969-1972). Despite its short life, its impact on the History of Art was very remarkable because it questioned the pictorial conventions, starting with the supports of the painting, such as the frame or the canvas, trying to break the established order and start again. His artistic practice was radical, and he questioned the foundations of art, painting and its ecosystem. Claude Viallat will manipulate canvases without a stretcher and will replace the canvas with everyday fabrics, such as sheets, blinds, umbrella or tent fabrics. He has even worked on surfaces on both sides, with processes of painting, impregnation and folding, and he defends "painting for painting's sake" without the need for a theme or pretext in artistic representations. In his case, he developed a new formal language taking as a recurring motif the same rectangular shape with rounded corners for more than fifty years, which will determine the composition of his works. The repetition and apparent simplicity present in all his works contradict the complexity of his subtle changes in size, formats and contrasts. He himself describes painting as "a tremor, an inner uncertainty, a commitment to change, to infringe, to subvert knowledge and consciousness".Viallat is represented in leading institutions and collections internationally. His work has been the subject of individual exhibitions, among which his retrospective at the Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou (National Museum of Modern Art in Paris) in 1982 and his participation in the Venice Biennale in 1988 stand out, as well as other more recent ones such as the Fabre Museum in Montpellier, the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany or the MuBe Museum in Brazil.