From June 25 to July 25, Claude Viallat presents at Ceysson & Bénétière Paris a selection of recent works.
It becomes quickly evident that the placing of motifs upon worn fabrics refers back to the origins of the form, to the origins of art itself. In this way, Claude Viallat vigorously shakes the coconut tree of modern art and of modernity. The making of each canvas turns him toward Prehistory, his own prehistory, toward a primitivism that never truly was, yet which he made his. He has imagined it, shaped it, constructed it, both parallel and opposed to the predatory primitivisms of Western modernity. Thus Viallat has engaged his art in a circulation, a gathering, a harvesting across all the “moments”, which Focillon called the “swellings” of art history, drawing from everything that may be connected, adapted, “naturalized” within his own quest for painting as truth. In the sense that certain authors have applied the notion of pastiche to Picasso, Claude Viallat is indeed a pasticheur. His recent works confirm this, as they summon and appropriate the figurative dispositif of Matisse’s Red Studio. As a result, all the forms applied on woven media, and every motif stamped on them, are transmuted into pictorial objects characteristic of the art practiced by Claude Viallat. They prove to be neither ornamental nor figurative. Nor are they abstract. Simply real. Pictorially true. Within each media, each motif displays and imposes its presence; each time, it integrates itself with the surface and its materiality, until it becomes, perhaps, nothing more than a sign. In each of its avatars, the motif thus affirms and proclaims its function: to ensure the intensity, the saturation of color. It is through its proliferation as a mark and a blazoning motif that it both is and is not; through its quasi self-generation; through its chromatic punctuation, sometimes assisted by the underscored by the counter form’s marking, that Claude Viallat’s produces that suspension which holds us motionless before its face. We are indeed seized, and at the same time elevated by these deliberate, conscious, and accomplished surpassing, by the vertigo into which the art of Matisse, among others, once transported us. And to which we are borne anew by the singular vision of one of the greatest colorists of all time: Claude Viallat.
Excerpt from Claude Viallat: his Form is sixty years old Bernard Ceysson, 2026.
