As part of the sale dedicated to Modern and Contemporary Art on April 8th, 2021, PIASA is pleased to offer for auction a beautiful piece by the French artist Robert Malaval.
Born in Nice, Robert Malaval came to painting as a self-taught artist, after having been an electrician. Installed then in Haute-Provence, he raises silkworms which will inspire him his famous series of the White Food: as he explains it, this one is "born, initially, of the observation of natural phenomena, like the invading secretion of the caterpillars of the bombyx, from which is born the cocoon, in the breeding of the silkworm, which I practised, and where you obtain, from the imponderable, hundreds of kilos of grey. "Under this unusual title, the artist created a series of reliefs and sculpture-objects over a period of ten years, the series of the White Food, which includes one hundred and twenty reliefs and sculpture-objects, will retain Malaval for ten years. With its monochrome whiteness, it contrasts with the previous series (1956-1960), which consisted of dark-colored reliefs with rough, lumpy and uneven surfaces.
The works in White Food, however, do not embody an ideal of purity and perfection, but rather refer to the idea of malaise and illness. As shown in our work, Trophée colonial, winter 1961, to make the Aliment blanc, Malaval favored papier-mâché, a craft technique with which he had become familiar in his youth while making large masks for the Nice Carnival (the artist also used more unusual materials such as grains of rice, peanuts ...).
The White Foods are multi-faceted, fictional sculptures of different natures that invade Malaval's environment (paintings, armchairs, bodies, studio) and escape any attempt at a strict definition. He considers them to be "scripted objects" that everyone is free to question and interpret. One can see in these whitish and organic excrescences, with the aspect sometimes hieratic, sometimes stringy or inflated, the incarnation of its neuroses but also that of the constraints and the obsessions of each one. Some have seen in the materialist excesses of White Food a metaphor for the invasion of our society by a form of illness, a kind of excrescence that would be a rejection by the material. If the White Food opens to Malaval the doors of the galleries, he will try to "change the life" after this series, by integrating into his paintings of the spangles which he called "stardust".
