Supports / Surfaces

Supports / Surfaces was created by graduates of the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier and the National School of Fine Arts in Paris in southern France. Vincent Bioul, born in Montpellier in 1938, was one of the founders of the movement and the author of its name.

The existence of the group did not last long. Since 1966, participants have been exhibiting together, and the premiere exhibition Animation, Recherche, Controntation took place in 1969 at the Paris Museum of Modern Art . The name of the association - Supports / Surfaces - was invented immediately before the show. The artists included in the group adhered to leftist views and sought to free painting from traditional attributes: the tyranny of taste , the banality of expressionism , the sentimentality of late surrealism and the purity of a particular art . This desire was expressed, inter alia, in the denial of canvas and frame.

The artistic search for the band members was combined with a theoretical understanding and political position. Ideas were published in the group's Peinture / Cahiers Theoretiques . By 1972, internal divisions reached a critical level, and the group split up.

Supports / Surfaces can be considered the youngest, albeit later, French avant-garde movement in the history of modernism that completed this cycle of art development.

Exhibitions

The first Peinture en question exhibition was held at the Specialized Architectural School in Paris, in March-April 1969, with the participation of Alocco, Daniel Desoise, Doll, Page, Pencemen, Patrick Saitour and Claude Viallat ^[1] .

In June 1969, an exhibition at the Le Havre Museum, called La peinture en question, was attended by Louis Cane, Daniel Deseuse, Patrick Saytur and Claude Viallata. In the exhibition catalog

The object of painting is painting itself, and the exhibited paintings exist on their own. They do not turn to something “external” (the personality of the artist, his biography, art history, for example). They do not offer to run away somewhere, because the surface, thanks to the tearing of the shapes and colors that are used in them, prohibits the mental projections or fairy tales of the viewer. Painting is a fact in itself, and it is on its basis that tasks must be posed. This is not about returning to the origins and not about finding the original purity, but about the simple disclosure of the pictorial elements that make up the pictorial act. Hence the neutrality of the works presented, the lack of lyricism and expressive depth in them.

Original text (Fr.)

L'objet de la peinture, c'est la peinture elle-même et les tableaux exposés ne se rapportent qu'à eux-mêmes. Ils ne font point appel à un “ailleurs” (la personnalité de l'artiste, sa biographie, l'histoire de l'art, par exemple). Ils n'offrent point d'échappatoire, car la surface, par les ruptures de formes et de couleurs qui y sont opérées, interdit les projections mentales ou les divagations oniriques du spectateur. La peinture est un fait en soi et c'est sur son terrain que l'on doit poser les problèmes. Il ne s'agit ni d'un retour aux sources, ni de la recherche d'une pureté originelle, mais de la simple mise à nu des éléments picturaux qui constituent le fait pictural. D'où la neutralité des œuvres présentées, leur absence de lyrisme et de profondeur expressive.

In formal terms, Claude Viallat summed up the work as follows: “Desuze painted frames without a canvas, I painted canvas without a frame, and Saytur painted frames on canvas.

The premiere exhibition in Paris was attended by Biul, Devad, Desez, Saytur, Valencia and Viallat.

Style

The style of the Supports / Surfaces group is characterized by an approach according to which the material, creative gestures and final actions are of equal importance. The subject is given only secondary importance.

Since 1966, the traditional attributes of painting have been called into question: Burallot cuts and reconnects pieces of canvas and frame elements.

Vincent Biul painted “ sur le motif ” from the very beginning. He believed that the image is filled with both its own content and the artist’s memories. He was inspired by familiar places, which he described as "holistic." Landscape remained his favorite genre, he liked to say that "we remember another place, the past, which haunts our soul and whose landscape is a metaphor."

Deseuse separated the canvas from the frame. Viallat used old materials, tarpaulin pieces, umbrellas, various fabrics, ropes and ropes.

Bernard Pade and Tony Grand worked with wood and ropes. Jacquard used ropes with for prints on canvas, and exposed the resulting paintings simultaneously with the ropes, which served as a painting tool.

Rouen painted two canvases, which he cut and bound with each other. Saitura used a folding technique.

Cane used stamps and stamps, and Viallat used colored stencils. In addition, Meris and Viallat used artificial dyes.

All these techniques testified to the desire to return to a primitive gesture. These ideas were preceded by the Japanese avant-garde movement Gutai , founded in 1954. Similar studies of creativity and the creative process developed in the late 1960s around the world, especially in the context of American minimal art and Italian arte belief .

Other destinations

In addition to general ideas, each artist worked in other directions, from free figurativeness to abstract expressionism . Since the beginning of 2001, a separate space has been allocated to the creativity of the Supports / Surfaces group at the Pompidou Center (Room 11, Level 4).

The Fabre Museum in Montpellier opened a large retrospective exhibition of the work of Vincent Bioule in the summer of 2019.

The Supports / Surfaces group officially included twelve artists or sculptors, mainly from the south of France:

The ideas of the movement were shared by other artists who remained outside the group:

• Marcel Alocco (born in Nice in 1937)
• Pierre Burallho (born in Maison Alfort in 1939)
• Christian Jacquard (born in Fontenay-sous-Bois in 1939)
• Jean-Michel Meris (born in Lille in 1938)
• Francois Rouen (born in Montpellier in 1943)

• Contemporary Art Movements (1970-present) (neopr.) . www.visual-arts-cork.com. Date accessed August 8, 2019.

• Supports / Surfaces publication in Ceysson Editions d'Art, 2010