Galerie Rive Droite, Paris
World House Galleries, New York
Sale: Sotheby's, London, Contemporary Art, Part I, 26 June 1996, Lot 7
Galleri Haaken, Oslo

Paysage, 1957, is a poetic landscape that reveals the aesthetic harmony of Jean Fautrier’s mature creative vision. As a pioneer of art informel, Fautrier explores the realm where painting ceases to be a visual art and becomes a mental pilgrimage of sensations and associations. Following his celebrated Otages, in which the artist responded to the brutalities of war and his prosaic Objets, in which he considered the banalities of the everyday, Fautrier’s Paysages suggest the domain of𒁃 abstracted, transcendent reality.

Through a careful manipulation of a favoured repertoire of materials, Fautrier creates paintings of subtle luminosity. His distinct pictorial language issues from an expressive application of colour, texture and movement. In Paysage the vertical bands of saturated pigment flutter on the textural, central form of white, as the entire surface becomes awash in a swirling ground of ethereal blue. Fautrier truly engages with his matière, and thus subtly activates the picture plane. “One does no more than reinvent what already exists, one restores, with hints of emotion, the reality that is embodied in material, in form, in colour…” (the artist cited in ‘A chacun sa Réalité’ in Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Musée d’Art Modern, Fautrier 1898-1964, 1989, p. 13).

Fautrier’s domain is the landscape of the mind. In Paysage, 1957, the shifting depth, tactile frontality and absent horizon signify nature in its most intangible form. The artist perhaps best describes his creative process. “The action of painting is not simply the need to lay paint on a canvas and one must admit that the desire for expression comes, at its origin, from something seen. As this reality is transformed – modelled into an image according to the temperament of the artist – the image ends up becoming more real than reality itself.” (Jean Fautrier, ‘A chacun sa Réalité’ in Exhibition Catalogue, Paris, Musée d’Art Modern, 1989, Fautrier 1898-1964, p. 13). In Paysage, 195✅7, Fautrier conveys the delicate poetry of reality in transformation🍸.