PIASA organizes a Modern and Contemporary Art auction on Wednesday, June 1st, 2022.
Featuring 42 lots, this auction offers a remarkable panorama of 20th and 21st century art through a selection of pieces that are particularly rare on the market. The selection is very international and includes works by major artists such as Hervé Télémaque.
Born in 1937 in Haiti, Hervé Télémaque, after studying at the Art Student League in New York, moved to Paris in 1961. He spent time with the Surrealists and later developed a visual language close to Pop Art and Narrative Figuration, of which he became one of the major representatives. Telemaque's work from this period combine characters from comics and Walt Disney's cartoons, various consumer goods (women's underwear, household utensils, etc.), through a glossy layout with bright colours. These works have their own unique atmosphere of biting humour and poetry. In 1968, Télémaque's taste for assembly and relief encouraged him to insert objects directly onto the canvas, creating compositions that he would later use in his paintings.
Hervé Télémaque (b. 1937)
Ciel de lit, 1963
Estimate: 120 000 / 150 000 €
The painting we present here, created a few months after Télémaque's arrival in the French capital, entitled Ciel de lit, 1963, affirms the artist's desire to distance himself from the abstraction that dominated the Parisian scene. The shapes are clearly figurative and become more precise, while confirming their sexual character. Ciel de lit is a series that shows women's underwear, which, for Télémaque, both reveals and prohibits the desired body.
In this version, real objects such as a girdle, garter belts, binoculars, a compass and a zip are mixed with painted elements that revolve around an arid planet.
Like the female underwear (girdle) and the black ball that dance on lighter backgrounds in a beautiful energy of metamorphosis, these elements were born from the imaginary of the conquest of space, in vogue at the time.
The automatic writing of the surrealists, transposed into painting? Combine this with advertising and cartoon characters. A new breakthrough occurred in 1963, when our painting was made: the composition is based on the separation of a sensual geometry and the ironic affirmation of new figures: the girdle and garter belts form a joyful ballet, the quotations become legible, "shh", ordinary objects settle in and reality itself takes its place.
Télémaque's work is now internationally recognised. In 2015, the Centre Pompidou (Paris) paid tribute to him with a remarkable retrospective. In 2018, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York acquired an historic painting by the artist, Untitled (The Ugly American), 1964. Finally, Télémaque had a monographic exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London: A Hopscotch of the Mind (October 2021 - January 2022) and an upcoming exhibition in Miami (2022-2023).
