Jean Fautrier at Michael Werner - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The French painter Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) is an anomaly. A fiercely private man, in his early years he made profoundly expressive paintings whose simple make subordinates -- nudes, heads, flowers, fruit -- were elevated to melancholic, plane tragic, distinction by his thick applications of paint, frequently scored and scumbled, which speak with quiet oratory of the emotions associated with external realitys of everyday life. His impastoed surface is a stylistic trait that is also recognizable in the later Art Informel work for which he is best known.

Fautrier received considerable recognition during his lifetime. Authors similar as Francis Ponge and Andre Malraux answered to his abstractions; he was awarded first prize in biennials in Venice (1960) and Tokyo (1961) After his death, however, his reputation declined. This exhibition, seven years in the making, consisted of 21 small to moderate-size paintings and three tin sculptures, most created in the 1920 It introduces us to early work that stands actual much on its own, at liberty of formal and thematic influences.

Fautrier's earnest, unaffected approach makes him strike one as being slightly awkward, especially in comparison with more worldly artists of that kind as Picasso or Matisse. As with abundant of Fautrier's art, his still lifes are approximations of form in which the sensuous handling of paint communicates the artist's involvement with his make subordinate matter. While he tends to work with somber tones -- almost all the paintings in the present to view had dark backgrounds -- he is also in command of color; in The Flower saucepan (1928-29), the flowers are returned in luminous yellow, orange and white against a gray table mat and a gray vase. In Still Life with Onions (1926) Fautrier establishes a dialogue with the humblest of thing perceiveds Four onions and a kitchen knife are painted with shut attention to color and form, as if these were idealized portraits. Here the artist speaks whirls through his love of paint as a material interesting in and of itself.

Fautrier also painted women with an ardent awkwardness. The beauty of his female heads, full-cheeked and short-haired, springs as much from the application of paint as from the women's features. His 1929 denuded portrays a voluptuous female in reddish tans; she lies upon her back upon a roughly painted white sheet, her knee drawn to single side. Her face is single suggested: two circles for organ of sights and a thick brushstroke for a chaps An accompanying bronze, Large Reclining uncovered (1928), repeats this pose; here, too, a scabrous surface and the bare intimation of a face are profoundly expressive of feeling beyond form. Fautrier's pervasive passion, in more [i]or[/i] less ways similar to Rouault's grief, finds in pigment a redemptive material and an encompassing view.

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