Jean Fautrier
Swirls (Remous), 1958
Artist
Jean Fautrier
Title
Swirls (Remous)
Year of creation
1958
Technique and dimensions
Oil and tempera on cardboard on canvas, 81 x 130.5 cm
Year of acquisition
1987
Referenced top right: fautrier 58
Jean Fautrier received his artistic training at the Royal Academy in London. After New Objectivity nudes, still lifes, portraits and flowers, he created the “Nus”, bodies in a dark palette; his picture objects became increasingly anonymous and heavier. In the 1930s, due to a lack of recognition, Fautrier temporarily withdrew from painting and worked as a ski instructor and hotelier. After his exhibition "Les Otages" in Paris in 1945, pictures of pain and the experience of death, Michel Tapié found the term "Un art autre" for Fautrier's painting, a painting of the French Informel whose peculiarity is fundamentally different from "dripping painting". of a Jackson Pollock in the USA.
Fautrier has since become famous with his evocative, impasto, layered color body painting and thus also inspired the “Art Brut” painting of Jean Dubuffet. Fautrier's technique was also new: “He applied a hot color paste to the picture, which he shaped into the desired shape with a painting knife. He sprinkled pastel powder onto these, which combined with the colored mass to form a colored body. Basically, it was a fresco technique that took the place of oil painting: color matter replaced the old picture figure created using illusionistic means.” (Dieter Honisch, 1989).
The “swirls” in the picture associate infinite wave movements in the water, but as powerful swirling color movements they ultimately became the object of “painting” themselves. The painting thus offers two levels of viewing: a “before” or a “behind” of two color islands lying one above the other, which are and want to be nothing but “abstract” paintings, but also the view from above of an imaginary, rugged island surrounded by waves grant sea.
Fautrier is thus the initiator of a very differentiated painting, which, despite all the compactness of the impasto, always refers to itself with its torn relief of surface-relatedness: “In fact, you only ever feel what is again, recreate reality through emotional nuances , that reality that embodies itself in material, form and color: creations of the moment, transformed into the unchangeable.” (Jean Fautrier).
The picture comes from the collection of the Italian Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo, Milan, and was acquired together with Le Chasseur by Jean Dubuffet on the occasion of the club's 10th anniversary in 1987.
Roland March
