Gaston Chaissac at Jan Krugier - Brief Article

Coinciding with an extensive Gaston Chaissac retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, this novel gallery show was the artist's first fresh York solo in over 30 years. It included 41 paintings, plastic arts and works on paper spanning the career of the French outsider artist and writer, who died in 1964 at age 54

Chaissac's outsider status stipes largely from his inclusion in the Art Brut collection assembled by the agency of his onetime friend and colleague Jean Dubuffet now housed in the Musee de l'Act brut in Lausanne, Switzerland. During his lifetime, however, Chaissac disliked the association. Although he was self-taught, the Burgundy-born artist's career was not real different from that of other midcentury mainstream French artists.

He began to make art in 1938 while hospitalized for tuberculosis, and quickly established a highly individualized manner of writing of drawing and painting. His colorful, schematic figures are usually made of unmodulated patches of bright pigment or textur paper, heavily outlined in black and arranged like jagged pieces of a jigsaw perplex These works drew the attention of Robert Delaunay and were later championed by dint of Andre Breton as well as Dubuffet A number of Chaissac's contemporaries saw his eccentric semiabstractions as an important part of the unravelling of European modernism. Beginning in 1941 Chaissac participated in numerous exhibitions quite through France, and, by the time of his death, his influence upon French art was widely acknowledged.

The relationship with outsider art persists, however, because of the obsessiveness of his work and its disregard for the canons of Western figuration. Referring to his works as "rustic expressions," Chaissac lived for greatest in quantity of his life in the countryside, far from the Paris art view He shunned conventional artists' materials; he painted upon everything from wallpaper and stones to furniture and animal bone Decades before Chris Ofili, he and Dubuffet planned a collaborative series of "cow-pat" paintings. A particularly humorous work in the display La Tinette (ca. 1947), is a made of wood outhouse seat adorned with colorful geometric forms and a smiling face. Elsewhere, a large, animated collage, Composition with Gray Visage (1963) features a kind of crazy-quilt patterning made of swatches of wallpaper. In this work, a central figure looks to kick up its heels. Its misshapen, furry head is indicated by the agency of a torn piece of richly adorn with raised worked gray wallpaper outlined in black.

In the early 1960 Chaissac began to populate his surroundings with tall, totemlike figures made of scrap grove An austere, almost Cubist example with a fulvous face seemed to preside above this show like a stand-in for the artist himself.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group