Claude Viallat continues to expand his gigantic painting project, with outstanding humbleness and vitality. “Everything is for the best” brings together 60 recent works produced between 2022 and 2024. The exhibition demonstrates the extraordinary creativity of one of the most radical painters of his generation.

Rejecting both the boundaries of canvas and frame, Viallat has completely deconstructed the rules of painting and those of exhibiting artworks. He unconditionally embraces discarded fabrics, bedsheets, clothing, sunshades, or curtains, that become the support of his work. He applies acrylic paint onto these varied industrial or household fabrics, endlessly repeating a single, intentionally meaningless form.

«I know what I’m doing, but I don’t know what the outcome will be, and yet I must willingly accept it all.» The artist does not anticipate anything; things simply happen naturally. Once there is anticipation, one falls into a dilemma, placing oneself above the results to be achieved. He prefers to embrace whatever chance brings.

Claude Viallat desacralizes both the painting itself and the figure of the artist. He rejects any idea of inspiration, he defines himself as a “worker” engaged in “labor.” In Viallat’s world, there is no transcendence nor creation ex nihilo, instead, there is random, boundless reconfiguration, which is source of infinite joy and pleasure.

At 88, Claude Viallat has remained devoted to the path he forged over fifty years ago, as well as his roots. Every morning, he immerses himself in the pure delight of painting in his studio in Nîmes. His dedication mirrors that of the “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” from the Wei and Jin periods in China, where Ji Kang and his friends withdrew to the mountains, abandoning the rules and hierarchies of the time, to indulge in the joys of free conversation, music, calligraphy, and poetry. Could Claude Viallat be seen as the ‘eighth sage’ of the Bamboo Grove? Chinese audiences may find their own answers as they visit Viallat’s first exhibition in Shanghai.