Galerie de la Béraudière is pleased to reopen its exhibition, ‘Dubuffet and the Matterist Artists’.
The post-war period was favourable to new pictorial movements, and several artists, such as Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) and Jean Fautrier (1898–1964), rejected established cultural values and wanted their works to come alive before perishing, like life.
To create their works, they used a range of unusual materials, ranging from sand and gravel to tar and asphalt, among others. They saw art as a creative process whose elaboration viewers must be able to follow thanks to the traces left by the artist: scrapings, incisions, prints, etc. Viewers also had to feel an emotion in front of the power of the gesture and the treatment of the matter.
Another major artist of Matterism, a movement that spread across Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s, is the Spaniard Antoni Tapiès (1923–2012). An admirer of Jean Dubuffet’s art, he described his own creations as ‘battlefields in which wounds multiply infinitely’. Through the medium of art, he expresses depth, light and shadow but also the violence and anger of a people rising from its ashes.
These artists were not the first to explore new surface treatments. At the end of World War I, surrealist painters such as Max Ernst, Joan Miró and André Masson had used materials that gave them more spontaneity. Eager for new experiences and fond of a little nonsense in art, these artists sought to disorient viewers. This approach still appears relevant today and Galerie de la Béraudière invites you to (re)discover the tactile quality of a selection of works by these modern masters.
