On the occasion of the "Art + Design of a European Private Collection" sale on Wednesday, September 23, 2020, PIASA presents a coherent set of furniture and works of art by artists from the second half of the 20th century, including François Morellet.
A major figure of geometric abstraction, François Morellet was, in the early 1950s, one of the few artists in France to have paved the way for early minimalist art. Marked both by Mondrian and the concrete art of Max Bill, he eliminates in his creations any arbitrariness, any trace of sensitivity and subjectivity. This radical approach to creation led him to define a working method that consists in elaborating a system before the realization of his works.
A founding member in 1960 of the Groupe de recherche d'art visuel (G.R.A.V.), Morellet has multiplied the types of plastic intervention, from painting on stretchers to projects in the city and architecture. The frames, the development of numerous systems, the irony of his titles, the use of chance determine his approach. Indeed, as a good spiritual son of Alphonse Allais and Raymond Roussel, Morellet prefers to play with systems by introducing humor into them, as perfectly illustrated by the "Strip-teasing" series, inaugurated in 2005, of which we present two paintings (Streap-teasing n°3, Streap-teasing n°7, 2005).
The sexual allusion contained in the play on words in the title (strip for "stripe") is embodied in the confrontation between a thin line and a large film of paint within the same canvas. In the catalog for the "Réinstallations" exhibition that the Centre Pompidou devoted to Morellet in 2011, Catherine Millet returned to the original character of this series in the following terms: "The visible part of unlimited variations has become increasingly tangible.
A beautiful series of canvases illustrates the trend, Strip-teasing (2007-2008), by making the same weft appear alternately with the help of thin lines or very wide strips that seem to cover them. The process is extremely rich in possibilities. The result is works that are sometimes very complex, other times impressively simple.
François Morellet (1926-2016)
Strip-teasing n°7, 2005
Estimate : 40 000 / 60 000 euros
For example, on one half or two noncontiguous quarters of the canvas, part of the intervals between the lines are colored, so that it is the border between white and color that extends the line, obviously blurring the location of the screen.
Alternatively, the fine lines are replaced by neon lights and the wide black stripes appear, by contrast, as signs. One cannot do more complicated in the repetition of the same ".
