Lot no. 30
After Georges MATHIEU "Abstraction sur fond rouge" (Abstraction on a red background)
Oil on canvas
Signed Mathieu lower right.
83 x 130 cm
Provenance: private collection Luxembourg
This work was inspired by a similar version of a painting by Georges Mathieu entitled 'Hommage à Saint-Georges', oil on canvas from 1966 signed lower right, from Château Saint-Georges in Saint-Emilion.
It perfectly evokes the force and rich gestures of Geaorges Mathieu, a French painter considered to be one of the fathers of lyrical abstraction.
In 1947, at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, he exhibited canvases with a texture made up of blobs directly sprung from the tube, claiming to be the inventor of dripping, a technique developed by Jackson Pollock as early as 1945. In Mathieu's case, the colours were crushed by the artist's finger as early as 1944.
From 1954 onwards, he created a multitude of paintings, often during performances or happenings timed in front of an audience, which highlighted the speed and virtuosity of his gestures.
From 1980 onwards, his paintings marked a new maturity, breaking with the last vestiges of classicism and abandoning the central figure, while at the same time expanding his palette.
Mathieu's paintings, which he called "Lyrical Abstractions" - hence the name the movement took on - went beyond the constraints of tradition and formal regulatory systems, establishing Mathieu - along with Fautrier and Dubuffet - as one of the leading exponents of French Art Informel.
The works of this singular and erudite artist reflect all his thoughts as a former philosophy student. Indeed, the imprint left by the existentialists, whose thinking was very widespread in France at the time, is noticeable in his abstraction. "Mathieu's speech was very interesting. He said, applying to painting the idea of the existentialist philosophers who claim that existence precedes essence, that the sign precedes meaning"[1] explains gallery owner Patrice Trigano on this subject. His art is therefore a discursive work, full of signs that must first be written and then reveal their meaning. This is where the freedom of the artist lies, a veritable demiurge of his own discourse, just as every man, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, thrown into the dereliction of the world, is the creator of his own life, confronted with a paralysing freedom with which he must be satisfied in order to invent his own path.
In 1963, Georges Mathieu became an art theorist and founder of tachism in his essay "Beyond Tachism". He was thus a total artist: painter, draughtsman, furniture designer, sculptor, but also theorist.
