Martial RAYSSE - Paintings, statues, poems 1974-2014 Exhibition catalogue 6 july to 11 november 2024

Résumé :
Martial RAYSSE - Paintings, statues, poems 1974-2014 CHÂTEAU DE BIRON (Dordogne) 6 July to 11 November 2024. Exhibition catalogue. Martial Raysse was born in 1936 in Vallauris Golfe-Juan, where his parents were ceramists. A precocious creator of poems, drawings and watercolours, he began studying literature and art in 1954. He drew and painted, then embarked on a more experimental artistic practice, based on soldering together objects taken from everyday life, the fruits of which he called Poèmes-objets or Tableaux-objets. Martial Raysse has chosen to offer the château’s visitors a collection of paintings, drawings and statues chronologically situated after the so-called ‘pop’ phase, the movement he pioneered in France and from which he broke away at the end of the 1960s, for fear that it would lose its creative impetus and become trivialised by fashion. In his recent exhibitions, he has chosen to omit this part of his catalogue, in order to highlight creations that are more representative of his current work. Shortly before his arrival in the Périgord, and after leaving the United States and the French capital, he lived in the Ile-de-France countryside, drawing, painting and sculpting, inspired by his natural surroundings. This was also the case when he moved to the Dordogne to escape the conditioning of the art market. He wanted to paint or sculpt the great historical and mythological subjects as in the 17th century, but also contemporary figures, models that moved him, his own familiar world, scenes that revealed the beauty of the world but also its decay and injustices, mocking humanity and its failings with an often wicked sense of humour. Over the last decade, he has produced monumental paintings, immense friezes that testify to his technical mastery and great originality in the treatment of colours, whether acrylic or tempera, permitting chromatic shocks in the service of an imagination freed from pre-existing methods and concepts.
Réduire le résumé