The Sunday guest. The Nîmes painter Claude Viallat: the singular imprint of simplicity

Claude Viallat has been creating every day for nearly sixty years. The walls of his Nîmes workshop bear witness to this prolific inspiration. Here, works hung on the wall; there, others carefully folded, stacked, by dozens. The ground bears its colorful stigmata and hundreds of supports rolled up and classified in a mezzanine wait to be grasped by the artist's hand. The very one he holds out, robust but delicate, to welcome you. Claude Viallat, 88 years old, gray head and polite smile, seems a little elsewhere. Perhaps not quite out of the creative process of the morning – a composition of woodwinds and strings – or already thinking about that of the afternoon, one imagines. “I have always worked in this regular daily manner”he said, his tone placid.

An artist's life like a working life

Thus he would place his life as an artist at the rank of “work”of professional activity, almost hardworking, and by extension, he would define his creativity as a mechanism, a sort of action followed to give form, relegating the subject to the background. The philosophy, in part, of Supports/Surfaces, this movement created with his friends from the Beaux-Arts of Montpellier in 1969, Bioulès, Dezeuze, Saytour… Together they redefine the status of painting and works as objects. There is the frame (the canvas support) and the canvas (the surface). “Dezeuze painted frames without a canvas, I painted canvases without a frame and Saytour the image of the frame on the canvas”. A perfectly iconoclastic group because it radically breaks with academic painting, ignoring romanticism and conventional aesthetics. “It was also the Province which claimed its emancipation from Paris”analyzes Claire Viallat, one of his two daughters, an art history professor.

Nicoise salads

During this period, his father found his style after making “multitudes of essays that didn't represent me. They looked like Nicoise salads.” When leaving “upside down” as he says, in the most primary way possible with a canvas, a fabric and a color in search of “something that stands out”. He then thinks of the way masons paint with lime by dipping a cloth or sponge and dabbing the walls. He found his technique. But he needs an image to carry it. “There was the idea of ​​the hand but it evokes control, reach, grip… I wanted some form. A shape for all shapes and any shape.” Chance will give it to him. “I cut a shape out of packing foam. I dipped it in color and pressed it onto the canvas and it made shapes for me. The result was neither good nor bad. I couldn't figure out clean the foam plate. So I left it to soak overnight in bleach. The next morning when I got it back it was in shreds and the biggest piece was the shape that remained.

Leave luck to chance

Claude Viallat likes to leave luck to chance. This is even what drives him in his art as in his life. “I have no prior project. Each time the support, such as it is, burlap, velvet, plain, floral… takes on color, it gives it back to me in a different way. I don't dominate anything. The profession of painter is about matching colors. For me it's the opposite. I put on paint and I accept what the canvas does with my work. I have reversed the whole academic process that I learned. Each time, the material, dimensions, shapes decide for me and I always accept it.”

Instrument of its creation

Claude Viallat would therefore be a painter at the service of painting, a tool, even the instrument of its creation. The irony is that it also denies any upstream reflection. “It comes during and after. I have no planned result. I accept this one necessarily. Nothing can displease me. It's pretentious to say that I'm never wrong but it's true since I don't want anything.” Welcome things as they come and rejoice in the unexpected. Claude Viallat accepts this rule of the game on his supports and on the surfaces… of reality. Protestant belief? Possible, but don't look for a hidden religiosity in its repeated motifs. His work is devoid of this, even if his intense and intuitive imprints sometimes emanate a strangely mystical dimension. What is irrefutable is that his brightly colored works demonstrate the influence of Matisse and that “the overwhelming Picasso” still haunts his paintings of bulls in his “way of seeing and thinking”. Claude Viallat, nourished by lunches in the meadows and bullfights, is a realistic painter when it comes to bious. An aficionado which demonstrates his solid roots in the region, as his daughter Claire explains: “Shape after shape, a bit like step after step, through these markings he shows his anchoring both in the present and in the territory, in an almost animal way. This territory between Nîmes and Aubais nourishes him, it is his breeding ground in a way. From canvas to canvas, he also developed a territory in the physical sense.”

Henriette, her support since 1963

Since 1963, he has shared his painting country with Henriette, his wife. Not a muse but “always a help and support”, he said. He also took with him his grandson Théo, 23 years old, the one with whom he had coffee every day when he was in high school and with whom he shares his passion for comics. He assists him with two other assistants. Claude taught him “patience and culture”.

The latter he deplores “secondary school in Nîmes. Too bad because culture is what remains at the end”he blurted before getting back to work. Work, always. “It's him who is important. I live my work. I don't really have the memory of the past or the projection of the future. Today, I want nothing other than to be able to work on what makes me rest of life”he says, grabbing a pink sheet which he cuts with scissors then tears with his hands. He then places it on the ground before carefully covering it with another printed fabric guided solely by his intuition. He then takes a stencil, a famous imprint, and places it with gestures slowed down by the ravages of time, as many times as space allows. Then place the outlines inside with a large black brush and start again several times. He walks away, looks at his work then dips a brush in the white and fills in the prints, carried by the shapes and colors, in an intuitive gesture. “The painting will be finished when the painting puts me outside the canvas”he specifies.

Seeing him work, we grasp the infinity of his work. His painting uninhibited, so liberated. Desacralized! Blessed be Claude Viallat for this sweet sacrilege.