« Une fourmi de dix-huit mètres[…] ça n’existe pas » – Robert Desnos (engl. « An eighteen-metre ant […] doesn’t exist »)
Olivier Mosset, born in 1944 in Bern, once a member of the famous BMPT group with Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Michel Parmentier, who sought to democratize art through radical procedures of deskilling, implying that the art object was more important than its authorship, is nowadays widely recognized for his conducting of research into the future of painting through geometrical abstraction and monochromes. Living between two continents since 1977, Mosset remains one of the few artists in Europe that is involved in the French, Swiss and American artistic and critical contexts.
Dating from 2008, the extremely large format acrylic canvas Untitled (blue / purple / blue), measuring 197 x 1773 cm and consisting of a group of three panels, each 2 x 6 meters and covered with blue and purple colour, does not represent a break with his early work, but should be regarded as a re-start, a re-presentation or even a re-production that continues his quest for blurring the margins of art.
When we asked Olivier Mosset about the story behind this large format canvas he answered:
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« Une fourmi de dix-huit mètres[…] ça n’existe pas » – Robert Desnos
(engl. « An eighteen-metre ant […] doesn’t exist »)
Olivier Mosset, born in 1944 in Bern, once a member of the famous BMPT group with Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Michel Parmentier, who sought to democratize art through radical procedures of deskilling, implying that the art object was more important than its authorship, is nowadays widely recognized for his conducting of research into the future of painting through geometrical abstraction and monochromes. Living between two continents since 1977, Mosset remains one of the few artists in Europe that is involved in the French, Swiss and American artistic and critical contexts.
Dating from 2008, the extremely large format acrylic canvas Untitled (blue / purple / blue), measuring 197 x 1773 cm and consisting of a group of three panels, each 2 x 6 meters and covered with blue and purple colour, does not represent a break with his early work, but should be regarded as a re-start, a re-presentation or even a re-production that continues his quest for blurring the margins of art.
When we asked Olivier Mosset about the story behind this large format canvas he answered: “There is no story, but it was made and shown in China. Then Mosset reveals: “In fact, the story of China was that I met this gentlemen and they had this gallery that was pretty big and someone said: ‘Olivier, you have done 6 meter high monochromes in blue / yellow and pink / purple, you should do something like that’. And that’s how the story started. I reversed what was done with those first 6 meters monochromes and showed yellow / pink and blue / purple monochromes on three walls in the gallery. In another space, I placed Untitled (blue / purple / blue) and because this room didn’t have the same height, I put them in length – that’s the story.
This immense monochromatic canvas of 18 meters in length reconsiders the intellectual property of his early monochromes. In a way,Untitled (blue / purple / blue)islike a huge blow-up of a coloured variation of his ample monochromatic canvases he painted in the early ‘80s or of the large-sized panels he showed in 1990 at the Swiss Pavilion for the 44th edition of the Venice Biennale. Accordingly, Mosset explains the development of his large-format monochromes: “The first monochromes were 3 x 6 meters with red stripes on a red background because I knew I was exhibiting at the Paris Biennale. And once I did an exhibition in Lyon, we showed 2 x 6 meters monochromes but placed on top of each other, so the whole measured 4 x 6 meters. Someone told me that these canvases were large but when I was invited to the Venice Biennale at the Swiss Pavilion I said to myself that I could try to do really large format canvases and there I made for the first time really large monochromes.”.
Divided into three equally sized canvases, stretched along the wall on 18 meters and offering a notably rigid contrast in geometry, we must not forget the importance of the square in Mosset’s work: if you placed the three canvases on top of each other, the result would be an equilateral square. His work poses a challenge to the notion of a programmatic response to a set of aesthetic problems that come out of an artist’s struggle. In Mosset’s opinion, the personality is beside the point and a painting always exists for itself. This view contradicts much of what we assume about art and authorship: “There is always a dialectic in the way I do things, there is always a criticism of what I do. I try to contradict everything I do and that’s what keeps me going because when I’m not happy or even if I’m happy, I want to do it again; there’s both repetition and contradiction. At the same time, my work is what it is. It’s up to everyone to decide what he or she want it to be”, he confirms.
His latest works favour polyptych and diptych, all composed of an assemblage of monochromes. Two colours generally compose them and ensure their harmony. Their imposing format guarantees efficiency. Elegance characterizes them. Their formal neutrality prohibits any comments. Thus, in his current production, Mosset has not finished criticising the traditional rectangular painting format and so giving good artistic practice a hard time: copies, diversions, appropriations, reworking, delegation recycling, tributes and movements are part of his work and also help our interest in this incredibly surprising output. While his work tends to escape from historical determinations, playing with our expectations and disrupting the rules, it can nonetheless give us an impression of the perpetual mise en abymethat Olivier Mosset applies to his own work.
Michèle Meyer
