A painting is no longer reduced to this simple flat surface within the limits of a regular and traditional framework. However, the pictorial object comes in all tones. The sober shaped canvas Ellsworth Kelly lending to paintings the cut-out of a sailboat wing, then those complicated ones by Frank Stella, bristling the canvas with curved panels that rebel and bite each other. In the 1970s in France, there was a period where artists refused a frame, preferring to let the canvas drag on the ground. They want to show the canvas itself, its own and ethical skeleton, and then more recently, the canvases of Philippe Decrauzat and Blair Thurman, digging a hole in their center and relegating the painting to the periphery of a gaping hole. It is to say if the shaped canvas is not a genre in itself, rather a modality of painting supporting all tones, from the most depressive or pessimistic to the most jubilant and radiant, this last inclination being this year the most amended. By Jordan Madlon and his small cut-out canvases that take pleasantly cartoonish and cartoonish forms, while remaining abstract, as well as those, elongated and intertwined, pastel and relaxed, of Justin Adian, passing by the paintings of Ruth Root, who, at 50, is almost a dean. But we have rarely seen in France her paintings looking like cadastral maps, town planners' diagrams or, better, these maps, diagrams or graphic representations of statistical, demographic, economic data, which stretch traditional geographical representations. Giving the world a more synthetic, less realistic representation (in the line, the composition or the palette) is also what other young artists are heading towards who, without at all attacking the regular limits of the painting, nevertheless force the trait of the distortion of the contours of reality. Amélie Bertrand delivers sets with distorted perspectives and acidulous colors soaked in a photoshop bath. At the same time, the Swiss Nicolas Party or the German Andreas Schulze reduce their characters and everyday objects to a kind of geometric silhouettes, avatars of Malevich's formalist peasant women the humanoid robots of video games.
© Beaux-Arts
- gerard van weyenbergh
