Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes
Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes
Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes
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ANDRé VALENSI<br />
<strong>Les</strong> Prairies's artists<br />
Objet d’Analyse, 1969. Collection Musée d’Art Mo<strong>de</strong>rne of Saint-Etienne Métropole.<br />
Photography : Yves Bresson.<br />
André Valensi was one of <strong>the</strong> founding <strong>the</strong>orists and<br />
artists of <strong>the</strong> Supports / Surfaces Group (1969–1972),<br />
which is consi<strong>de</strong>red as <strong>the</strong> last abstract avant-gar<strong>de</strong> in<br />
France. The artists in <strong>the</strong> group were purists and political<br />
militants who <strong>de</strong>constructed painting in or<strong>de</strong>r to reduce<br />
it to its bare essentials – picture, surface, grid, stretcher,<br />
frame, and so on. They rejected any outsi<strong>de</strong> influence such<br />
as narrative, art history or artists' lives. Objets d’analyse<br />
offers <strong>the</strong> behol<strong>de</strong>r various studies of colour, form and<br />
spatial relationship. In this work Valensi methodically<br />
split up <strong>the</strong> colour brown into blue, yellow, red and violet,<br />
which he applied to lengths of ribbon or tied fibres that<br />
he <strong>the</strong>n ma<strong>de</strong> into "chains of chains". And yet Valensi<br />
claimed that he had never ma<strong>de</strong> any objects by plaiting<br />
or weaving and he knew nothing about <strong>the</strong>se techniques.<br />
If, like Clau<strong>de</strong> Viallat, André Valensi had used ropes and<br />
nets, it was to ensnare <strong>the</strong> behol<strong>de</strong>r. And in<strong>de</strong>ed Piège<br />
à regard ma<strong>de</strong> a clear reference to Marcel Duchamp's<br />
installation for <strong>the</strong> First Paper of Surrealism exhibition<br />
in 1942. Valensi's shifting grid transposes <strong>the</strong> plane into<br />
three-dimensional space; as <strong>the</strong> spectator moves about<br />
t<strong>here</strong> is an alternation of gaps and solids, and <strong>the</strong> colours<br />
move. Valensi left Supports / Surfaces in 1971 to <strong>de</strong>vote his<br />
energies to his own paintings.<br />
Born in 1947 in Paris (France), died in 1999.<br />
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