Temporalité du geste

In this exhibition, gesture does not disappear in the moment: it is inscribed, repeated and transformed. For Claude Viallat, repetition becomes a visual practice in which memory takes shape. He rejects the pictorial hierarchy between form and substance. The organic motif, osselets, is applied ad infinitum, but always with slight variations to become imprints of the artist, anchored in Sans titre (n°1bis), 1997. Each mutation is a marker of the passage of time: from the relationship to the body, to the living, to the wear and tear of his stamps. In the work of Jorge Eielson and Simon Hantaï, the plastic process registers an inner temporality. The canvas becomes a memory of a past gesture. The work reveals itself in the unfolding or knotting.

Here, paint fades away to allow form to emerge, and what remains is the culmination of a silent but powerful act.

Pierre Soulages, Lucio Fontana and Pablo Atchugarry give the gesture an almost cosmological dimension, where light or sculpted rifts suggest what time records in matter. Fontana’s perforations do not destroy, but open up temporal passages to an infinite space that lies beyond the medium. Soulages, on the other hand, deliberately constructs his work in such a way that time is contained in every stroke of paint. It was in the 1960s that the artist pursued and radicalized his research into light and depth, intensifying the role of the pictorial material itself. His calligraphic gesture of this period becomes a tool of revelation in Peinture 100×81 cm, May 23, 1969. His works are permeated by dark lines and thick black masses, creating a tension between opacity and light.

Before these compositions, which become spaces of contemplation, the viewer can lose himself and forget all notion of time.