Martial Raysse

Martial Raysse is a French plastics technician born the February 12th 1936 with Gulf-Juan (the Alpes-Maritimes). He lives and works with Issigeac (the Dordogne).

Biography

Wire of craftsmen ceramists of Vallauris, Martial Raysse starts to paint and write poems as of the 12 years age. After solids secondary studies, it chooses to study the letters all as a practitioner the athletics with high level, before turning to painting at the 19 years age. It starts by carrying out assemblies of refuse and various objects presented in boxes of Plexiglas. In 1958, it takes part in an exposure of group, Longchamp gallery, in the presence of Jean Cocteau. In a few years, it becomes one of the best painters abstracted on the Riviera and its works reach an excellent dimension when it calls its career in question.

Fascinated by the rough beauty of the plastic, it foams the department stores at flat prices and develops its concept “of hygiene of the vision” which brings into play new objects in figure of the new business of consumption: “I wanted a world new, asepticized, pure and on the level of the techniques used, on one level with the modern world. ” Success is with go: fifteen minutes before the opening of its exposure to Milan in 1961, all its works out of plastic are sold with collectors.

It remains with the the United States where it approaches the Pop American art and fact part, as of its foundation in 1960, of the movement of the realistic Nouveaux. Raysse can then be defined like “a painter of the modern life”.

As of 1965, the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam devotes a retrospective exposure to him. The following year, it realizes with Niki de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely the decorations of a ballet of Roland Petit. With the Biennale de Venise in 1966, it obtains the price reserved to the old artists of less than 45 years.

The events of May 1968 lead the artist to an important reflection on the nature of the work of art, of which he denounces in particular degradation in goods. With the threshold of the Years 1970, Raysse achieves a true esthetic revolution, rather single in the history of the art of the 20th century, and which one can bring closer to that of the French painter Jean Hélion. It is devoted to the cinema, by carrying out extra-soft Camembert in particular (1969) and a feature-length film, the Big departure , in 1970, with the prophetic title. He then undertakes “to start to live”.

The esthetics which it gradually sets up starting from 1972 is in total rupture with pop works of the previous period. Raysse is devoted in particular to the practice of the drawing according to nature (series a garden at the edge of the Marne ), and does not hesitate either to join again with the traditional kinds of painting in the Années 1970 - 1980 (series Loco Bello in 1975, Spelunca in 1977 and the Small house in 1980 in particular).

At the same time, he undertakes a work of sculptor, initially using poor materials (papier-m4ach3e, paste with stone, kraft paper) then with more large scales, by having recourse to the traditional technique of the bronze cast iron with lost wax. With the favor of many public orders it carries out in the Années 1980 two fountains with Nimes in 1987 and 1989 and of the mosaics in Paris, Place of Iéna (in the Métope S of the building of the Economic and Social Council builds by Auguste Perret).

An important retrospective of its work (painting, sculpture and cinema) takes place in 1992 with the national Galerie of Jeu de Paume in Paris. In 1997, the Center Georges-Pompidou exposes forty years of graphic work. A first exposure takes place in China October 24th with the November 12th 2000 at the central Institute of the Art schools of Beijing.

Work

Starting from 1959, Martial Raysse uses any kind of materials and techniques: plastic, plexiglass, néan, mirror, painting, artificial lights, objects, photographs, photocopies, flocking, cutting, assembly, carryforward, assembly, enlarging in particular.

Its series of the Table-objects puts in scene the image at the same time sensual and artificial, soft and cold, distanciée and lyric of the consumer society, in particular of the mannequin-type of the Années 1960, modern Venus declined and put in scene in acidulous colors. In its works, the violent colors are projected with the spray, play on the dyed with carmine red female faces, acid, purple, blue green.

Raysse will introduce then neon into its fabrics to underline certain forms, the mouth, the eyes. “I discovered neon. It is the alive color, a color across the color”. The artist adopts a step of reduction of the average plastics and simplification of the representation at the end of the Années 1960. He uses all the techniques of production of the images, in particular the Photographie and the Sérigraphie. The representation of the forms is gradually simplified and is reduced to silhouettes of a head with shoulders, cut out in paperboard, paper, fabric to give rise to Formes in freedom close to the Poor art.

Of 1963 with 1965, it carries out a series which it entitles ironically Made in Japan . This unit comprises about fifteen works, of which the goal is to divert famous tables, mainly of Ingres, with which Raysse dialogs very freely. The version according to Large Odalisque , preserved by the National museum of Modern art, in is an example emblematic. Of pop esthetics, it takes again part of the fabric of Ingres. Work is strengthened on fabric then repainted with bright colors which point out those of the advertizing posters (red, green fluo…). Raysse adds crushed glass to it and a fly, elements aiming at criticizing the mimetic claims and illusionists of traditional painting.

One will also retain with same a view to work the fabric Soudain last summer of 1963 or the sculpture America America (1964, National museum of Modern art, Paris), where the use of neon as stereotyped returning to the universe of publicity is then completely characteristic of the speech of the artist.

He breaks with the tradition, the rules and the techniques for désacraliser work, the démonumentaliser, to make him lose his unicity (indeed, one will find impressions of its works in the stations, subways etc and he will preach the marketing of the work of Article) and finally to cancel the idea of an art which would require a technical virtuosity.

Raysse carried out a fabric at the time of its retrospective of 1992 to the national Galerie of Jeu de Paume, the Carnival in Périgueux , true pictorial synthesis painted with softening on fabric, the technique of predilection of the artist. Attractive ravelled masked characters is spread there with the manner of the ancient planks (one thinks for example of the plank of the Panathénées)

In 2001, Raysse constructs its first stained glasses in a new Parisian church (the Notre Dame church of the Ark of the Covenant). The bright colors of the two panels (on the topics of the Visitation and of David dancing in front of the Arch ) testify to a certain continuity with the pop work of its beginnings.

In 2005, Raysse constructs the frontage with neon of a cinema multiplexes Parisian.

Quotations and judgments

“I never made painting, I always worked on images. To transform them, to draw a new language from it. ” (Martial Raysse)
“Martial Raysse always worked in Nice, from where it comes. Its standard accumulation, it is very Nice. It constitutes the proof that New Realism can take influence on reality. It is the example most clearly of an art which wants to be act of behavior. The effect is very salutary compared to painting-paintings. It is a proposal of fresh air” (Pierre Restany, 1961)

See too

Sources

Dictionary of the modern art and contemporary , nlle. ED., Paris, Hazan Editions, 2006, pp. 567-568
Note on Martial Raysse on the basis insecula

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