On Thursday June 3rd, 2021, PIASA is organizing a Modern and Contemporary Art auction. This superb sale will bring together 101 lots including two magnificent works signed by Claude Viallat.
Born in Nimes where he lives today, Claude Viallat studied at the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier and then in Paris (1963). He moved to Nice while teaching at the School of Decorative Arts, where he met some of the artists of "L'École de Nice" (Arman, Ben, Bernar Venet). During 1966, he developed his process, which consists of systematically working with a single matrix form, a kind of bean affixed in impregnation on an unstretched and unprimed canvas, at regular intervals. From then on, Viallat used any type of flexible support to question the components of the pictorial act and resorted to dyeing processes to color the canvas. While exhibiting regularly in Paris at the Jean Fournier Gallery, Viallat, from 1968 onwards, began to work on knots and nets and experimented with new ways of hanging his works. His preoccupations joined those of other artists with whom he formed the Support-Surface group in September 1970; he quickly resigned after numerous disagreements in May 1971. Settled in Marseilles in 1973, Viallat developed his work using unusual colors and supports, thus testing the differences in material, texture and color from one work to the next. The 1970s were a period of full pictorial development, as evidenced by our work, Untitled, No. 150, (1974).
Claude Viallat (born in 1936)
Untitled, n°150, 1974
Estimate: 40 000 - 60 000 €
On this large canvas, Viallat has painted, in a repeated and regular manner, his matrix motif. But he distances himself from monochromy: the repeated form is no longer plain but composed of four colors, red, yellow, blue and green, which stand out on a wine-colored background. Viallat reveals his talents as a true colorist in the play of mixing colors, which from one motif to another is never the same, depending on the reaction to the support and the amount of paint applied, giving the impression that the canvas is dancing. The artist, who lets himself go here to a real jubilation of color, works in a totally instinctive way, as he explained in 2006 in an interview with Pierre Watt: "I am never in something I know because I always have this kind of surprise to be in front of a color that, because it is or because it is not quite, is going to play on another string than that of aesthetics, that is to say, simply of the good decision that one has taken. It will play on all the hazards of the color. It is this sum of hazards that will give this kind of quiver that makes the quality of the canvas."
Claude Viallat (born in 1936)
Untitled, n°213, 1989
Estimate: 25 000 - 35 000 €
