Born in 1936, Claude Viallat is one of the founders of the Supports/Surfaces avant-garde movement that emerged in the early 1970s. This ephemeral movement questions the traditional elements of painting. Figures in the movement included Vincent Bioulès, Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, Jean-Pierre Pincemin and Noël Dolla. They formed a group that propounded both art theory and politics. They called for a fresh approach to art that challenged the traditional materials used for painting, the canvas and the stretcher. Viallat began to work on industrial tarpaulins without stretchers, covering them with the same endlessly repeated abstract shape. This “shape”, which can call to mind different images such as a knuckle or a hand eventually became his signature motif. Reproduced using a stencil, in a variety of colours and on different surfaces (upholstery fabrics, rugs, recycled materials), this motif eradicates the notion of “subject” and enables Claude Viallat to explore the meaning of the creative gesture and the status of the “work of art”.

Today, Claude Viallat is an artist who cannot be ignored. His approach is particularly topical given the development of the young American scene that reworks the heritage of Viallat and Supports/Surfaces. Raphael Rubinstein recently wrote in Art in America that “the kindred impulse – to deconstruct painting, to turn to the everyday world for materials, to favor process over image, to reject the brush but not painting itself, to foreground materiality – is seen everywhere in current abstraction.” A more profound rapport with Supports/Surfaces and Viallat “can be seen in the work of New York-based artists such as Gedi Sibony, Matt Connors and Blake Rayne, as well as chez Jennifer Boysen and Noam Rappaport in Los Angeles.”