The enormous Château de Biron in the Dordogne was a medieval fortress, besieged and taken many times, gradually transformed into an aristocratic residence from the 16th century onwards.e century. It contains most of the architectural styles from the Middle Ages to the 18th century.e century, and unity is not its strong point. Hanging contemporary works in such a place is therefore an awkward exercise, as it often is in historical monuments: omnipresence of stone, very large rooms, tortuous circulation. Invited to be the host, Martial Raysse chose those of his works that best suited the place. It is therefore not a retrospective that we are going through, but an anthology of works from the 1970s to more recent ones, arranged not according to their chronology, but according to what the circumstances suggest.
Read the portrait (in 2014): Martial Raysse, the stubborn one
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The success is evident in the first room, in the building called “des Maréchaux”, monumental. Martial Raysse shows a set of large vertical canvases in which he makes sparing use of color, or even does without it to draw in charcoal the race of a naked Diana and her dogs in an empty space. The allusions to myths and tales (a unicorn, a dragon) are also restrained, barely more than sketched.
The interpretation is all the freer. Is it a black coat attached to a nail or a ghost? Is it an old peasant in a faded blue blouse sitting on a chair or a magician? What is certain is that these works, which were shown for the most part in the artist’s retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou in 2014 and at the Palazzo Grassi the following year, were not shown as well. The adequacy between their formats and the walls and between their legendary tone and the history of the castle is perfect.
Incongruities
But Martial Raysse cannot allow himself to be confined to one style, however beautiful it may be. The second half of the exhibition, one floor higher, reminds us of this. There are works from several periods, of which only his first is excluded, that of the 1960s and his version of pop art. There are pastels and gouaches from the “Loco Bello” cycle. from 1974-1975, landscape and still life essays in which he abandons the modern reproduction techniques he had used until then and seeks to approach nature by direct means.
He takes his subjects by looking out of the window or in the house where he has retired in the Périgord, not far from Biron. From these first experiments in drawing and painting to the last years, here evoked mainly by female figures, the continuity is flagrant. Studies on the motif, posing sessions with models, skillfully regulated compositions: it is a question of representing the world in the clearest way.
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