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ANDRé VALENSI
Les Prairies's artists
Objet d’Analyse, 1969. Collection Musée d’Art Moderne of Saint-Etienne Métropole.
Photography : Yves Bresson.
André Valensi was one of the founding theorists and
artists of the Supports / Surfaces Group (1969–1972),
which is considered as the last abstract avant-garde in
France. The artists in the group were purists and political
militants who deconstructed painting in order to reduce
it to its bare essentials – picture, surface, grid, stretcher,
frame, and so on. They rejected any outside influence such
as narrative, art history or artists' lives. Objets d’analyse
offers the beholder various studies of colour, form and
spatial relationship. In this work Valensi methodically
split up the colour brown into blue, yellow, red and violet,
which he applied to lengths of ribbon or tied fibres that
he then made into "chains of chains". And yet Valensi
claimed that he had never made any objects by plaiting
or weaving and he knew nothing about these techniques.
If, like Claude Viallat, André Valensi had used ropes and
nets, it was to ensnare the beholder. And indeed Piège
à regard made a clear reference to Marcel Duchamp's
installation for the First Paper of Surrealism exhibition
in 1942. Valensi's shifting grid transposes the plane into
three-dimensional space; as the spectator moves about
there is an alternation of gaps and solids, and the colours
move. Valensi left Supports / Surfaces in 1971 to devote his
energies to his own paintings.
Born in 1947 in Paris (France), died in 1999.
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