Venice:
Palazzo Grassi – Martial Raysse. The exhibition at Palazzo Grassi, Martial
Raysse, until November 30, who is one of the most important living French painters and
winner of the 2014 Praemium Imperiale. This is his first monographic exhibition outside of France since 1965 and it is the perfect
opportunity to discover or rediscover his work and to explore the dedication
and proximity between the collector and the artist.
Above. America America – 1964.
Photograph
by Matteo De fina – courtesy Palazzo Grassi
Martial
Raysse and Caroline Bourgeois
Martial
Raysse. The exhibition is curated by Caroline Bourgeois in close collaboration
with the artist, it brings together more than 300 works from 1958
to the present day; paintings, sculptures, videos and neon works, almost half
of which have never been shown to the public. The course of the exhibition,
which is non-chronological, offers a new point of view on his work, by underlining, on the one hand, the multifaceted nature of his artistic
production, and, on the other hand, the continuous dialogue and echo he has
established among his works throughout his sixty years of career.
Martial
Raysse. The painter emerged at the same time as major post-war American artists
such as Warhol and Liechtenstein and he worked in Nice, Paris, New York and Los
Angeles. Although one of the major artists of the second half of the 20th
century, Raysse has only recently gained the same reputation as some of his
more well-known ‘Pop Art’ contemporaries.
Above.
Japan – 1964. Made in Japan – La Grande Odalisque – 1964. Portrait of an
Ancient Friend – 1963. Proposition to Escape: Heart Garden – 1966.
Palazzo
Grassi: Martial Raysse – The Ground Floor. “We wanted the exhibition to cover
every aspect of Raysse’s artistic practice: from his small sculptures, which
range from simple figures to games played with himself, through the drawings as
works of preparation and his films that he uses to convey his libertarian
ideas, to the pictures that compose his latest works. We have also punctuated
the exhibition with works that are in a way self-portraits, reflecting the
incredible demands the artist has made on himself and the loneliness he has had
to endure in order to move forward in his art.” Bourgeois explains.
Above.
The ground floor has ten display cases with ninety-five sculptures made between
1958 and 2014. Ailleurs
– 1987.
Palazzo
Grassi - Martial Raysse. “Photography for me played the role of a link
that, in the beginning, took the form of stereotyped faces of young women in
advertisements, leitmotifs of our visual culture. Through these faces, an
initially experienced form of communication establishes itself beyond the
preexisting formulas.” Martial Raysse.
Above. Make Up
- 1962.
Palazzo
Grassi - Martial Raysse
La
Belle Tarentaise - 1993
Palazzo Grassi - Martial Raysse. “In his history paintings, he offers to take a
critical distance from what we may see or believe. He explores mythological
subjects, as in L’Enfance de Bacchus or Le Jour des Roses sur le Toit, and uses
them to speak of conspicuous consumption, of his distance from politics
(Poisson d’Avril and Ici Plage, Comme Ici-Bas, below) or of his desire to laugh at the
foibles of his time (Le Carnaval a Perigueux, above). Painter, sculptor,
draftsman, but also poet and filmmaker: so many reductive terms with which to
attempt to define this multifaceted and unclassifiable artist whose work spans
the second half of the 20th century and continues, even today, to surprise us
with its idiosyncrasy.” For Alain Jouffroy in 1996, Le Carnaval a Perigueux
(1992) evoked “those twentieth-century painters who, with their violent irony,
their violent severity, depicted 1920s Berlin as a society play-acting as it
began to decompose, both mentally and politically.”
Above. Le Carnaval a Perigueux –
1992.
Palazzo Grassi - Martial Raysse. Raysse
continued to innovate and incorporated neon in his paintings creating iconic
works such as Nissa Bella in
1964 and then Peinture a Haute Tension,
above in 1965. Raysse’s first foray into cinema is the painting Suzanna, Suzanna (1964), in which a
video is included. After introducing film imagery into painting areas, the
artist produced several whimsical, burlesque short films featuring several of
his artist friends. He utterly unleashed his critical standpoint and penchant
for experimenting in these films. Two-way exchanges between cinema and painting
flourished, enriching both.
Above. Peinture a Haute Tension - 1965.
Palazzo
Grassi - Martial Raysse
Toi
et Moi – 2009
Palazzo Grassi - Martial Raysse. After 1962,
images of glamorous women came to dominate Raysse’s work. Whether in the form
of his unconventional, neon-hued canvases or in his early environmental installations,
Raysse’s new pictorial love of women was neither a misogynist about-face nor a
regression into representational art. His women are simultaneously the subjects
of his (pictorial) desire and critical ciphers for his sociopolitical insights
into the upheavals facing France.
Above. Nu Jaune et
Calme - 1963.
Palazzo
Grassi - Martial Raysse
Liberte
Cherie – 1991 - detail
Palazzo
Grassi - Martial Raysse
Raysse Beach - 1962
Palazzo Grassi - Martial Raysse. Ici Plage, Comme Ici-Bas, created
exactly fifty years later, (after Raysse Beach, 1962, above) is not an installation but a painting of unusual
size, measuring 3 meters in height by 9 in width. Chronologically it is the
last of a series of works of large format. The subject is identical to that of Raysse Beach but the
atmosphere here is very different: the two works are separated by a huge gulf
that is the results from a different way of thinking. In Ici Plage, Comme Ici-Bas the artist is not celebrating the
apotheosis of a happy and optimistic society as he did in Raysse Beach. On the
contrary, here the human figures painted in bright and acid colors seem to be
dancing casually on the brink of the abyss. In this work we find all three
of the traditional genres that Raysse has been practicing daily for at last
thirty years: portrait, landscape and history painting. These different areas
of his research come together in the large format, of extreme interest to the
artist in so far as it can accommodate on the one hand grand narratives and on
the other his love of detail, his fondness for a micro-painting strewn with
small comic annotations and mysterious symbols.
Above. Ici Plage, Comme Ici-Bas – 2012.
Palazzo
Grassi - Martial Raysse
L’Archer
- 1980