In Achim Hochdörfer's article in the February 2009 Artforum entitled A Hidden Reserve: painting from 1958 to 1965, the author names a number of painters included in this exhibition, "Whose practices are rich with implication." Le Tableau, continuing the conversation begun by Hochdörfer, attempts to expand his time frame historically, with a particular focus on the contribution of French abstraction from the post-war era through the present.
There has been a longstanding rejection of French painting due to American triumphalism and a misplaced sense of competition by artists and critics of all stripes. French painting now seems timely in that the identifiably American notion of the "flatbed picture plane"appears banalized, having exhausted most options left for abstraction. Here, the emphasis is on the particular contributions made by painters identified with France and their exploration of the paintings' physical facticity, of surface as a "thickness," and/or other complexities of painted two-dimensionality. "Le Tableau" is a term commonly used by French painters and theorists involved in an interrogation of what constitutes the condition of the painting and/or of the pictorial.
In the interest of a broad selection of French painting since WWII and contemporary works from Britain, the U.S. and elsewhere that is perceived as having parallel concerns, works have been included that some might consider more peinture than tableau. Much of the work selected places emphasis on the material means and/or structure of painting as a form or figure. Writing on post-war French painting, Clement Greenberg criticized "their surfaces with buttery paint and films of oil and varnish."i His observation was indicative of French paintings' continuance of tradition, but also of a desire to think and work with the givens of the conventional painting's complexity. This contrasts with Greenberg's dictum involving flatness, "purity" and a priori American reading of the painting as a tabula rasa or virginal plane. Artists associated with the Ecole de Paris in the period Greenberg was writing (1953) such as Fautrier, Hartung, and Riopelle used the aforementioned picture-making substances to negate the traditionally resolved painting. These French contemporaries of the Abstract-Expressionists were involved in a dismantling of the picture-object that at moments resembled an evisceration of the very body of the painting. This differs from the American project that tended to reduce painting to a single trope. (Still: the palette-knifed passage, Pollock: skeins of spatter, Rothko: sfumato, etc.).
In a paper delivered at the Courtauld Institute on French artisticii practice the painter Mick Finch translated a fragment of a Hubert Damisch textiii on how Dubuffet "liked working in the thickness of the ground—I mean the tableau—to reveal what is beneath: scratching the paper, incising and beating up the substance, skinning it and whipping it up to reveal layers below." Finch cites this description as a working of the surface as a "material entity in itself." This negation of the authority of the painting can be seen to reaffirm the haptic connection with the viewer. Jean Fautrier wrote, "in front of a painting that we like completely, there is a physical need as well as its fulfillment."
Joe Fyfe, curator
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