" I feel like a working subconscious. "
Claude Viallat is a French artist and one of the founders of "Supports / Surfaces" in the 1970s, a movement that calls for a renewal of art by questioning traditional materials. Throughout his work, Claude Viallat has never ceased to approach painting through motif and process. His imprint on canvas technique is almost as much a process of printing patterns on canvas as it is a positional motor for the painter's body. Approaching the exercise of Chinese calligraphy, where the harmony of the resulting forms is also and above all a gestural harmony, Claude Viallat, to paint, crouches above his supports. This gymnastics, this asceticism of the creative process, is also what distinguishes Viallat's painting. Between obsession and trance, Viallat's gesture is generally similar to that of Jackson Pollock or that of Navajo artists creating sand paintings. In all these cases, to create the painter must physically incorporate himself into the space of representation, of pictorial projection.