Claude Viallat

Overview

His neutral sponge-like or bean-like form, Claude Viallat's signature for over 50 years, has won him worldwide recognition: retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, participation in the Venice Biennale, acquisitions for the collections of the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris and MOMA in New York.

Claude Viallat was born in Nîmes in 1936, where he now lives and works. A founding member of the Supports/Surfaces pictorial group, the artist focuses on motif, repetition and process, rather than subject, which he places in the background, revolutionizing painting in the process.

Viallat's medium is free and heterogeneous. He works with diverted salvaged materials, found at flea markets, secondhand stores and attics. He paints on burlap sacks, umbrellas, parasols, table mats, boat tarpaulins and tent canvas, always deployed on the ground.

The artist's creative process is summed up in the repetition of a simple, recurring, instantly recognizable form across the entire surface of a canvas freed from its stretcher, using the all-over technique. A remarkable colorist, Viallat uses vivid color to apply the form that has made him famous, "the simplest, the most elementary, the most immediate there is", infinitely declined over the course of the supports.

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