Paris 2009 : The Lasting Quality of "Art Construit"

Past exhibitionFrom 17 January to 28 February 2009

More than ever, art construit has demonstrated its lasting importance on the French art scene. “Abstract,” “Concrete” and “Non-Objective” are concepts whose meanings are as varied as they are variable. Given that uncertainty, we prefer to speak of CONSTRUCTED art when referring to a movement that has lasted for more than century now, because that term profitably defines both its goal and its increasingly rich past.
As Goethe said, “The future is made from reconstructed elements of the past.”
In its modern sense, “constructed art” involves a strategy of cultivating a project that motivates each artist within the movement: it means acting rather than reacting.
The practice of art construit is a struggle that ennobles the artistic act, transcending mere anecdote. Its magic resides in its double role of actor and spectator in the birth of a work.
Chance and uncertainty are key features of the practice of many these artists, features that also figure in the work of physicists, biologists, and economists. The Surrealists elevated them into a theory, indeed a dogma. The most promising developments in chance and uncertainty are now to be found in the work of Geometric Abstractionists, the very artists who resisted Surrealism in the 1930s. The geometric trend, one of the most enduring of the century, has been regularly rejuvenated and even today produces highly varied art that is thoroughly contemporary.
Despite the success of Auguste Herbin, Victor Vasarely, and Jean Dewasne, this trend remains largely overlooked by the general public in France—it is perhaps the most poorly known of all the major art movements. Practitioners of “constructed” art incorporate chance into their work even as they retain the compositional rigor strictly associated with painting. Their approach respects a specific logic yet at the same time displays great diversity, as now recognized by many collectors and museums.

You will find the works of the following artists :
Charles Bézie, Jean-Gabriel Coignet, Jean-François Dubreuil, Jean-Michel Gasquet, Hans-Jörg Glattfelder, Renaud Jacquier Stajnowicz, Antoine Perrot ,
Denis Pondruel, Yves Popet, Henri Prosi, André Stempfel.

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Paris 2009 : The Lasting Quality of "Art Construit"