The Brooklyn Rail

In this exhibition, superbly curated by Molly Warnock, the paintings of Simon Hantaï are presented in New York, a city that has been very slow to appreciate and acknowledge the importance of this Hungarian French artist. Several times at the opening of the exhibition I heard the same comment—although images had been seen, one way or another, online or in a catalogue, this was in fact the first viewing of the actual paintings. And, as so often happens between Europe and the US, much can get lost in translation.

Jackson Pollock’s dripped paintings of the late 1940s and early 1950s exerted a challenge and presented an opportunity for painting; for Hantaï this meant finding technical alternatives to Pollock’s innovation in order to reinvent, and therefore reject essentialism, within the tradition of painting. All but one painting here, and the earliest, Sans titre (Untitled) (1958) are produced with Hantaï’s méthode(method) of pliage (folding), what might in the US be referred to inexactly as his process. Sans titre is made using a piece of metal, part of a defunct alarm clock, to scrape through in a gestural motion, the layer of still wet paint to the primed linen below. The reserve of canvas left unpainted in the later pliage paintings—the canvas bunched and tied before painting, then, after painting, unfolded and stretched, revealing a pattern of painted and unpainted canvas—relates to the negative line of gesture in Sans titre. However, an important change has occurred, specifically the exchange of speed (an investment in a form of automatism adopted from Surrealist methodology) to blindness, the slow painting of folded canvas that the artist is unable—is blind—to seeing, until the canvas is later unfolded and stretched. Both approaches reject a reliance on—or channeling of—subjectivity and amount to an exiting of self. Hantaï was particularly influenced by Georges Bataille’s writings on inner experience from the early 1940s. As Warnock said, in an elaboration of a point by Hantaï, “The procedurally blind labor upon the canvas is promised from the first to the work’s future unfolding, its revelation as a separate entity over and beyond its maker.” This position is quite a contrast to much contemporary painting I see that exalts identity and a conscious expression of self.

Hantaï adapted a new emphasis for each series of paintings in the changing reiteration of this folding method, and we see representatives of the results in paintings here from the “Mariale,” “Panse,” “Meun,” “Bourgeons,” and “Tabula” series. Banal as this technique may seem—and this was an important and wholly intentional aspect of the method—the resulting painting itself is visually highly eventful. Describing the difficulty he identified, Hantaï said “The problem was: How to overcome the aesthetic privilege of talent, art, etc…? How to banalize the exceptional? How to become exceptionally banal?” A trajectory can be traced from the random squeezing together of the canvas to create the mottled and fractured paint surface of Mariale m.c.1 (1962) through to the grid compositions of the “Tabulas,” made between 1974 and 1981. Mariale m.c.1 has black paint that appears to be residue from a first pass with a brush, leaving a dry initial mottle that the blue paint of this pliage painting then partially overlays. The still exposed canvas appears like cracks in the blue epiderm. By comparison we have the even grid of the horizontally oriented Tabula (1980): eight fractured blocks, matter-of-factly painted with red acrylic, folded then released and stretched. This continues Hantaï’s investigation of gesture, seen first here in Sans titre and then never absent from his paintings, always present as both the reserves of canvas and application of paint.

There was no endpoint to be reached with these series of paintings—they were ongoing, reexamining along the way; Hantaï’s methodology simply generated thinking and making as it continued. It’s a matter of when, I suspect sooner rather than later, Simon Hantaï gets his overdue recognition here in the US.