Artist: Georges Mathieu

Perrotin Seoul presents the first exhibition of Georges Mathieu(1921-2012) in Korea. The artist is considered a leading figure in lyrical abstraction, the post-war European art movement which emphasized improvisational and spontaneous expression. This exhibition focuses on a selection of paintings from the 1960s and 70s, exploring Mathieu’s aesthetic of performative and stylistic brushwork. An important retrospective of the artist's work will take place at the Long Museum in Shanghai from August 28 to October 27, 2024.

Through his boldness and his rejection of conformity, Georges Mathieu stands out as a key figure of abstract painting, which he passionately defended throughout the twentieth century. Combining spontaneous gestures with a dramatic dimension, the artist devoted his life to an endless quest for total freedom. His first solo exhibition in Korea, organized by Perrotin, offers the Korean public a chance to discover a rich selection of artworks from 1960-1970 that established the artist’s international reputation.

Born in 1921, Georges Mathieu became one of the leading advocates of a lyrical style of painting liberated from the constraints of figuration. Immediately following World War II, Paris was in the midst of upheaval and artistic turmoil, and the painter played a major role in a new artistic movement that firmly rejected the positivist rationalism of concrete geometrical abstraction, which was then in fashion. Variously called Abstraction Chaude, Art Informel, or Tachisme by art critics at the time, this new approach marked a profound transformation in modern art.

Instead of an optimistic and utopian celebration of a developing future, these artists individually expressed a disenchanted attitude toward their time in response to the atrocities of World War II. This rejection of the external world paved the way for a new creative direction turned toward introspection and the exploration of interiority. And Georges Mathieu occupies a special place within it.

In 1944, after his liberation from what he considered to be the “last constraints” on painting, i.e., figuration, the painter began developing his own artistic method. Starting in 1946, this approach led him to develop a unique abstract language characterized by a range of evanescent forms on flat tints of solid color marked by networks of lines of paint traced with fingers or fabric, or even applied directly from the tube. The gestural nature of a painting such as Siranday (1967), which is made of interlaced and intersecting shapes with full curves, illustrates the artist’s profoundly innovative work. Called "tubism," this style was produced by a rapid energy that Mathieu deemed essential, establishing an almost carnal relationship to the materials.

Drawing on Surrealism and its discoveries about automatic creative processes and the psyche, Georges Mathieu transformed his art into an outlet for the perceptible expressions of his interiority. The fundamental tensions of the human mind, alternating between creative jubilation and self-destructive violence, are transcribed onto his canvases through an artistic vocabulary of joyous splashes, blood-like drips, and volcanic projections. This liberation of primal impulses through the artistic medium retrospectively appears as a cathartic incantation. It reveals the intense impulses that characterize the postwar period, which was affected by the growing threat of a new world war (which would ultimately become a cold war) and the risk of a devastating nuclear attack.

A lover of French history and a fervent monarchist, Mathieu thought of his artworks as military skirmishes, conducted both against painting and with it. It is therefore significant to see illustrious battles become a recurring theme in his paintings. Their imposing size evokes the importance of the genre of history painting in the hierarchy of the arts.

Starting in 1947, the artist became recognized as the leader of what some would call the New School of Paris. In addition to his activity as a painter, he was committed to supporting his brothers-in-arms, taking on the dual function of art critic and theorist, as well as curating exhibitions. To counter the influence of geometric abstraction, Mathieu took the initiative of holding various “battle exhibitions” alongside the influential art critic Michel Tapié, highlighting the work of artists such as Camille Bryen, Jean Fautrier, Hans Hartung, Jean Paul Riopelle, Wols, and many others. The exhibition Véhémences Confrontées (roughly translated as “Opposing Forces”) at the Nina Dausset gallery in 1951 established this new abstract language in the world of Parisian art dealers. It was on this occasion that one of the first European confrontations between the American Abstract Expressionist movement and this new French abstraction took place, creating a bridge with the emerging artistic scene in New York.

Georges Mathieu’s first piece of writing on art, titled, La Liberté, c’est le vide (Liberty is the Void) was published in the catalogue for the exhibition H.W.P.S.M.T.B. at Galerie Colette Allendy in 1948. In this text, the artist established the foundation of Lyrical Abstraction as a “phenomenology of the act of painting.” Throughout his life, he defended the idea of art as a signifier, which, at the moment of its creation, must precede the signified. The artist concluded that “painting, in order to exist, does not need to represent.” (1) Instead, the artist’s formal language was characterized by a multiplication of signs, combining bars, crosses, loops, and splashes.

Inspired by his artistic quest for the liberation of the sign, for the next decade Georges Mathieu devoted himself diligently to the study of the East Asian arts that fascinated him. Shown in this exhibition, Celadon (1970) takes as its title the name of a type of Chinese porcelain that was widespread during the third and fourth centuries. Most of all, the artist connected the ancestral practice of calligraphy to abstract painting. This dialogue between East and West was explored in a new essay in 1956, titled Rapports de certains aspects de la peinture non-figurative lyrique et de la calligraphie chinoise (Relationships of certain aspects of lyrical non-figurative painting and Chinese calligraphy), the fruit of his discussions with Dr. Chou Ling and the Chinese master calligrapher Zhang Daqian.

Within these reflections, the painter aspired to produce a “fusion of their ancient art and European oil painting.” The ideas of speed and risk, which are essential to the practice of calligraphy, played a role in Mathieu’s artistic practice, particularly through a state of creativity verging on an ecstatic trance. Moreover, the recurring use of black in his color palette, as seen very strikingly in Chambly (1965), which is featured in this exhibition, could be influenced by the use of inks in this traditional Asian discipline. In the center of the composition, an imaginary ideogram, constructed by intersections and rows of blackish lines, stands out against an earth-toned background. This brings to mind the exclamation of the writer and adventurer André Malraux at the artist’s solo exhibition at Galerie René Drouin in 1950: “Finally, a Western calligrapher!”

During the 1950s, Georges Mathieu acquired an impressive international reputation. His success can largely be attributed to a series of trips he made between 1956 and 1962 to introduce his work to various international art scenes: Germany, Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, the United States, Israel, Lebanon, the UK, Sweden, etc. During his travels, the artist held public sessions of creative exploration, orchestrating a brilliant, dramatic staging of his painting in action and of his own appearance. As early as 1954, Mathieu produced La Bataille de Bouvines in only two hours in front of photographers and filmmakers. In these images, Mathieu appears alert, moving cat-like around the canvas before rushing at it in an almost dance-like embrace. In 1957, during a trip to Japan, he made a work wearing a kimono, in a performance that is still frequently studied. In retrospect, the artist can be seen as an extraordinary precursor to performance art and the happening, a few years before the term was invented by American artist Allan Kaprow.

While maintaining his allegiance to the premises of Lyrical Abstraction, Mathieu’s painting evolved over the decades toward new stylistic experiments marked by greater serenity, and he also began to include the applied arts in his work. During a lecture in 1980, the artist stated: “As for me, in very general terms, my development has taken me from a cry to an aesthetic.” Abandoning the violent offensives of history, Mathieu began to celebrate the powerful musical tonality of abstract painting, paying homage to illustrious seventeenth-century composers such as André Campra and Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre.

The late work particularly reveals the artist’s remarkable abilities as a colorist. In paintings such as Forez (1970), Tamatia (1979), and Datura (1980), his palette explodes in a shimmering profusion of colors, ranging over a wide spectrum from dark cadmium reds to shades of yellow, magenta, ocher, and luminous pale blue.

As shown by the painting Innocent III (1960), an explicit reference to an eminent medieval pope, this phase of artistic maturity is marked by a growing spirituality. Mathieu’s evolution tends toward syncretic pantheism, culminating in what we might call the “cosmic turn” in his work that culminates in the 1980s.

Pierre Ruault

(1) Georges Mathieu, Au-delà du Tachisme (Beyond Tachisme), Paris: Julliard, 1963, p.13.