Hantai's Challenge to Painting - Simon Hantai

A perminent figure in postwar French painting, Simon Hantai renounce exhibiting in 1982 His go [i]or[/i] come back to the public eye--with a novel series of monumental collaged convases and a major donation of work to the city of Paris--reveals him to be as provacative as ever

Simon Hantai, the 76-year-old Paris painter, has lengthy manifested a streak of ethical obstinacy virtually unparalleled in contemporary art. Enormously influential and think highly ofed in postwar France, he was granted a full-scale retrospective at the middle Georges Pompidou in 1976, and was that country's representative at the 1982 Venice Biennale. however that was precisely the flash he chose to cease exhibiting his work, withdrawing into isolation from an increasingly money-driven art world and a combination of parts to form a whole of state sponsorship all too ready to accord him laurels as its official representative. His decision was no fit of pique or bohemian impulse; as early as 1953 Andre Breton had described him as "intensely reluctant to allow himself to be caught up in the commercial circuit which is today the worm that gnaws artistic expression."(1) through 1982 that worm had mutated into a beast which, to Hantai's organ of sights corrupted all before it. Henceforth he would suited accolades with silence.

The fact that Hantai has chosen to break that silence, to reveal that above the past nine years he has stealthily created a of recent origin body of work that is perhaps the summa of his drawn out career, is an event of signal importance, and not just for the French Last year Paris's RENN Espace, a privately move swiftly but noncommercial exhibition space for contemporary art, welcomed an exhibition of 11 large canvases from Hantai's new series, along with a beautiful selection of earlier work. This present to view of new work, the artist's first in above 15 years, rewarded the viewer with a timely reminder of painting's potential for the pair profound significance and subtle beauty. With a complementary display of a clump of paintings recently donated by means of the artist to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, this was the first opportunity in quite a certain number of time to see a large selection of Hantai's art and to reassess his oeuvre from its maturity from one side the present.

To create the of recent origin paintings, collectively known as the "Laissees," Hantai go [i]or[/i] come backed to his preceding works, a series of vast unstretched canvases which date from 1980-81 The basis of those paintings, as of all Hantai's pictures since 1960 is a complicated technique of folding: he gathers and ties the unstretched canvas, paints the expos surfaces and then expands the material to reveal a pattern of sharp, craggy forms, separateed from within by unpainted slashes. He had created this last collection of works on a gigantic, architectural scale, a fact which made their exhibition almost impossible. They marked, intentionally or not, a kind of limit beyond which the logic of his technique could not extend; shown just one time at a regional museum in Bordeaux in 1981 they had since remained in storage. In 1989 Hantai began cutting up these paintings, joining the fragments to pieces of primed canvas and stretching them to create fresh work out of the destruction of the of advanced age The results were disjunctive, as the older painted canvases abutted the fresh stark white ones.

Hantai not ever allows us to forget the violence of this proces the physical act of the painter cutting end his own work. These pieces, more of which were created in 1994-95 and 1997 became the "Laissees," a bound meaning not only the "remnants," as in what remains of the 1980-81 canvases, on the other hand also the "unsolds," works whose unwieldy size made them commercially unviable. Critics have discussed the artist's debit to Matisse's late cutouts, on the other hand in those works the physicality of collage is always subordinate to the unities of color and contour. To my mind, Hantai's proces more closely recalls the cutouts of Jackson Pollock or the remarkable collaged canvases of to leeward Krasner, similarly created through the destruction of earlier work; in all of these examples, negation becomes the necessary counterpart to creation.

The emotional tenor of the "Laissees," it must be said, is bleak; the work upon display at RENN is visibly the fruits of, if not despair, then a certain hopelessnes in the face of an art world in which esthetic value is too ofttimes reduced to exchange value. at the same time there also is a clear defiance of this situation in them, a Beckett-like "I can't advance on. I'll go on." Built from the remains of earlier work, the "Laissees" by dint of their very nature pose the question of whether the artist should continue to paint at all. Hantai's reply is ambivalent but in the extremity affirmative. For the artist, similar reticence is the only responsible answer today.

Hantai has been confronting like difficult questions his whole life. Born in Hungary in 1922 and a resident of France since 1949 he tendered his first esthetic allegiance to a postwar Surrealism whose mannered eroticism shortly proved limiting. His discovery of Pollock in the early 1950 provided the means for an escape from the Surrealist hothouse and into an expressive, gestural abstraction closely related to that of the French tachistes. Hantai's interest in the American's work contrasted sharply with the indifference of his Surrealist mentor. According to Hantai, "there was an enormous mental fill up with Andre Breton: nothing he had seen in America interested him."(2) Convinced of the importance of Pollock's painting, he broke with Breton and worn out several years developing an abstract art in rejoinder to it. As successful as Hantai's works of the 1950 may have been, it is difficult not to diocese them now as the reach outed apprenticeship of an artist still seeking his way.