Gaston Chaissac: Mille Visages
To the category 鈥渁rt brut鈥� in which his works have too easily been included due to their candid spontaneity, simple shapes and bright colours, Chaissac preferred the term 鈥渕odern rustic painting鈥�. At the end of the Second World War, this 鈥渧illage painter鈥� definitely positioned himself against a Parisian art scene deemed too intellectual and cut from a formal freedom that only life in the 鈥渦npopulated countryside鈥� allowed. It was therefore sheltered from the centre that Chaissac鈥檚 work developed, at the same time on the fringes and in the recognition of his peers. For Otto Freundlich, who opened the doors to his Parisian studio in 1937 and encouraged him, with his wife Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, to paint: 鈥渁 master is born.鈥� Jean Dubuffet tried in vain to include him in his definition of 鈥渁rt brut鈥� and the artist couple of Albert Gleizes and Juliette Roche supported him. Though he was celebrated by an avant-garde community, he became famous quite late in his life as his body of work was different from that of the artists of his time.
Chaissac worked at breaking the virtuoso gesture of the painter, choosing instead a kind of assumed clumsiness: the outlines are not steady, delimiting flat surfaces of colour more or less irregular. From those geometrical shapes, smiling faces emerge, heads without bodies and without gender, indistinct human figures which are reminiscent of children drawings, and their abilities to make perceptible, in a few lines, primary emotions like joy and pleasure. His paintings seem to stem from some abstraction through a play on the shapes he creates, in painting and in collages of painted paper, until a face appears鈥攎ore rarely fragments of a body鈥攍ike that phenomenon of pareidolia that seems to show something familiar in random shapes.
His paintings seem to stem from some abstraction through a play on the shapes he creates, in painting and in collages of painted paper, until a face appears鈥攎ore rarely fragments of a body鈥攍ike that phenomenon of pareidolia that seems to show something familiar in random shapes.
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To the category 鈥渁rt brut鈥� in which his works have too easily been included due to their candid spontaneity, simple shapes and bright colours, Chaissac preferred the term 鈥渕odern rustic painting鈥�. At the end of the Second World War, this 鈥渧illage painter鈥� definitely positioned himself against a Parisian art scene deemed too intellectual and cut from a formal freedom that only life in the 鈥渦npopulated countryside鈥� allowed. It was therefore sheltered from the centre that Chaissac鈥檚 work developed, at the same time on the fringes and in the recognition of his peers. For Otto Freundlich, who opened the doors to his Parisian studio in 1937 and encouraged him, with his wife Jeanne Kosnick-Kloss, to paint: 鈥渁 master is born.鈥� Jean Dubuffet tried in vain to include him in his definition of 鈥渁rt brut鈥� and the artist couple of Albert Gleizes and Juliette Roche supported him. Though he was celebrated by an avant-garde community, he became famous quite late in his life as his body of work was different from that of the artists of his time.
Chaissac worked at breaking the virtuoso gesture of the painter, choosing instead a kind of assumed clumsiness: the outlines are not steady, delimiting flat surfaces of colour more or less irregular. From those geometrical shapes, smiling faces emerge, heads without bodies and without gender, indistinct human figures which are reminiscent of children drawings, and their abilities to make perceptible, in a few lines, primary emotions like joy and pleasure. His paintings seem to stem from some abstraction through a play on the shapes he creates, in painting and in collages of painted paper, until a face appears鈥攎ore rarely fragments of a body鈥攍ike that phenomenon of pareidolia that seems to show something familiar in random shapes.
His paintings seem to stem from some abstraction through a play on the shapes he creates, in painting and in collages of painted paper, until a face appears鈥攎ore rarely fragments of a body鈥攍ike that phenomenon of pareidolia that seems to show something familiar in random shapes.
Artists on show
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Mennour presents its first exhibition devoted to the last period of the work of Gaston Chaissac (1910-1964), an 鈥渙utsider鈥� artist positioned between modern and contemporary art, who claimed to be an 鈥渁rtist, poet and farmer鈥�.
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