Galleria Fumagalli hosts the exhibition “Claude Viallat. Toiles, objets, cordes et filets”, curated by Annamaria Maggi. Through a selection of 30 canvases, objects, cords and nets, the show offers a complete overlook on the more important languages explored by the French artist in the course of his long career. The works on show, especially the objects, the cords and the nets constitute a corpus of recent works, on view for the first time in Italy. Therefore, the exhibition offers an opportunity to discover and know about the complexity of this artist’s entire career. The common denominator in Viallat’s work is the reference to the primitive, the essential, the anti-form that has always distinguished the expression of the artist who was born in Nîmes (France) in 1936, the city where he lives and works.

His language came to expression in the 1960s, within the stimulating, vibrant cultural climate experienced in France at the time. Claude Viallat started from the need to review the genealogy of abstract painting and the Informel (without forgetting Cézanne and Matisse), identifying as a basic form its distinctive characteristic: a sort of essential, anonymous and almost primitive anti-form, a “trace” that acquired completeness and strength from iteration: the canvas left free, hanging on the wall, was scattered with these “traces”, with a personal, inimitable result, essential and at the same time hypnotic. The other inseparable element in Viallat’s work concerns his quest for uncommon, unusual, unexpected supports: canvases, tarpaulins and tents host his anti-forms, developing into the space, saturating it and becoming part of it.

His work cohabits with the support which retains evidence of the previous uses: they remain clearly visible. One constant in Viallat’s work seems to be the representation of the “tent”, the place of the beginning, a mobile, multiple, wandering architecture, in which space is transformed into real life. A rarefied perception, a rhythm, a colour, a sign and an attitude to freedom seem to be what the artist wants to convey through his art, which also comes to expression in an original sculptural output that involves objets trouvés, cords and nets which, like his canvases, remind of the artist’s amazement and interest in primordial situations, founding actions, elementary operations that are essential for existence.