Antwan Horfee - Cosmogol

Yves Zurstrassen - Ten Years

Nam Tchun-Mo - Spring

Claude Viallat. Et pourtant si... Carré d'Art Nîmes

For the first time, the town where Claude Viallat was born and has lived for over forty years is presenting a substantial selection of his works. It will fill the entire space of Carré d’Art, from the entrance hall to the two exhibition floors. Sourced directly from the creative heart that is Viallat’s studio in Nîmes, this exhibition will show the generosity of what the artist himself describes as his “numerous and spiralling” work – the diversity of its materials, of its dimensions, of its imaginaries.

A founding member of the Supports/Surfaces group and historic figure of French abstract art, Viallat is tirelessly developing a body of work which is at once instantly recognisable and constantly on the move. In addition to his paintings, the exhibition will feature numerous objects, somewhere between sculpture and fortuitous assemblage that are always at once precariously balanced and consummately elegant. Their playful simplicity dialogues constantly with the intense formal and chromatic pleasures of his painting.

This extensive exhibition will afford a vision of a ten-year period during the expansion of a practice that is constantly extending the play of colours towards unexpected forms. The painted fabrics and objects that constitute so many interconnected, tensed fragments of a great house of painting will be presented in every direction, from floor to ceiling, thereby recreating the immersive character of Viallat’s work: here visitors can move around freely, lose themselves along the threads of an unbroken conversation of colours and materials, dwelling in it, as if in a shifting cosmos that speaks both of the world and of ornament, of the archaic and the highly contemporary. In its empirical play with matter, its displaced resumption of primordial gestures harking back to the very origins of art and making, his work conjugates this ornamental, coloured drive in the present, drawing on the first prehistoric artefacts and the avant-gardes of the 1960s, going from practices originating all over the world to a markedly Mediterranean mooring. The polychrome splendour of his work makes Viallat one of the greatest colourists in history, combining the almost austere modesty of the means with the graceful ingenuity of a creator from the Magdalenian. For nearly sixty years now, the subtle yet luxuriant sensuality of this constantly expanding body of work has been a constant source of amazement, emotion and intellectual stimulation.

Exhibition catalogue, with a text by Matthieu Leglise and writings by Claude Viallat. The exhibition runs until March 3rd, 2024. 

Tania Mouraud - MAMCO Geneva

Some of Tania Mouraud's (*1942) productions are marked by the Holocaust, a debt to a father who was a resistance fighter fallen in Vercors under German bullets, which shapes her destiny: always taking the side of the oppressed - and, in general, that of women. It is also a way of being an informed citizen, of talking about life, its contradictions, and upheavals while moving between several cultures. Her work is a crucible where musical influences (John Zorn, Japanese "noise," Klezmer sounds, Luigi Russolo's "noise" manifesto), choreographies of Indian martial art, references to art history (from Leonardo da Vinci's Journal to the Russian avant-garde), and historical figures of resistance (Gandhi, Mandela, Martin Luther King) blend.

The exhibition dedicated to Tania Mouraud focuses on her works from the 1970s-1980s, especially the "meditation rooms." These psychosensory sound or silent devices have an ambitious goal: to integrate an additional space in new constructions. A form of spatial organization in which to refocus, exist mentally outside any constraint, bridging the gap between the meditation space ("in India, everyone has their Prayer Room," the artist readily says) and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.

From 1977, Mouraud covers the interior or exterior walls with words, enlarging the letters to the scale of the wall. Thus enlarged, the texts are more to decipher than to read, their understanding is slowed down; a way to break free from the instant reading modes imposed by the media.

"DCLLDF" (DIEUCOMPTELESLARMESDESFEMMES), a phrase from the Kabbalah, or "STOPONYOURWAYHOMEJUSTTOLOOKATAFLOWER," taken from The Tale of Genji, the first monument of Japanese and world literature written by a woman in the 11th century, are among the phrases or expressions that she offers for the reflection of visitors and passersby.

The MAMCO exhibition, entitled Da Capo, is also an opportunity to rediscover a work that belongs to the museum's collection of minimal and conceptual art, gathered in the Apartment: MENTATION, which refers to the ongoing action, the present of experience, the act of feeling itself. For the occasion, it is presented in its original version, a text printed on canvas. The exhibition runs until January 28th, 2024.