Tabula is dominated by strictly arranged blue squares sitting in a grid of bare canvas. Simon Hantaï’s invention of the technique of pliage (folding) meant that the final appearance of the painting came as a surprise to the artist himself.
He did not work with a primed and stretched canvas but instead, as in Tabula, he arranged the folding of the fabric according to a regular grid by knotting the squares at the intersections and painting the canvas in one colour. This introduced an element of chance and surprise to the creative process: the finished painting was only revealed to himself and the viewers when he unfolded and smoothed out the canvas. This technique of moving between chance and experiment, he regarded as a link between surrealist automatism and the All-over gestures of Abstract Expressionism.
Simon Hantaï (1922–2008)
Tabula, 1980
Currently exhibited: Yes (Gallery: From Zero to Action)
Material: Acrylic paint on canvas
Size: 230 x 416 cm
Inv-Nr.: B_432
Image rights: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Keywords:
Previous owner: Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris; unknown, 2010
Acquisition: Reinhard Ernst Collection, Artcurial, Paris, 2018
The Hungarian painter Simon Hantaï moved to Paris in 1948 where he quickly joined the Surreallist circle of artists and completed several fantastic paintings with animal motifs. When he first came across Jackson Pollock‘s action paintings and the works of Abstract Expressionism in 1955, he began to experiment with different techniques such as collage, grattage (scraping) and frottage (rubbing). In the 1960s, Hantaï invented the technique of pliage (folding), which he regarded as a link between surrealist automatism and the All-over gestures of Abstract Expressionism and would go on to dominate his later work. With this technique, the artist did not work with a primed and stretched canvas. Instead, he folded the untreated fabric kinto almost sculptural forms. He placed large areas of colour on these crumpled fabrics, thus introducing an element of chance and surprise into the work process. It was only when the canvas was unfolded and smoothed that Hantaï revealed the finished painting to himself and the viewer. With folding, he found answers to his questions: ‘How can you make the extraordinary banal? How can one become extraordinarily banal? Folding was a way of solving this problem. Folding did not presuppose anything. One only had to put oneself in the state of those who had not yet seen anything, to put oneself in the canvas. One could fill the folded canvas without knowing where the edge was. So one no longer knows where it ends. You could even go further and paint with your eyes closed.’ [1]
In the series of Tabulas (1973-1982) which followed, Hantaï organised the folding of the canvas according to a regular grid by knotting the squares at the intersections and painting the canvas in one colour. In this new system, he succeeded in controlling chance to a greater extent. The result is an interplay of painted squares sitting in the unpainted grid of the canvas. In the year Tabula from the Reinhard Ernst Collection was created, Hantaï exhibited a number of works from the series in the French pavilion at the 40th Venice Biennale.
[1] Simon Hantaï, in: Geneviève Bonnefoi: Hantaï, Beaulieu-en-Rouergue 1973, p. 23.
