Francois Morellet - artist, retrospective exhibition, Jeu de Paume in Paris

ArtForum, March, 2001 by Daniel Soutif

GALERIE NATIONALE DU JEU DE PAUME, PARIS

A few choice pages extracted from a vast volume--that would be one way to describe the Francois Morellet exhibition recently presented by the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. This two story space, once a temple of Impressionism, is sizable enough, but it still couldn't accommodate a complete retrospective (thus making the necessity for one all the more glaring) of a prolific artist, now seventy-four years old, whose first pictorial forays date back to the immediate postwar period.

Nonetheless, curator Daniel Abadie, who organized the exhibition in close consultation with Morellet himself, managed to skillfully assemble a selective anthology of the artist's work--a process that involves at least as much sacrifice as choice--without hesitation or remorse, cleanly dispensing with entire sections of his oeuvre. To get off to a vigorous start, no work prior to 1952 was included, so that the artist encountered in the show's first rooms was one already immersed in geometry. Parallel lines and colored dashes arranged evenly on wood or canvas; square paintings in which fine black tracings outline sixteen squares here, thirty-two rectangles there; and the various possible configurations, methodically enumerated, of an L-shaped figure resulting from the combination of a square and a long rectangle: These are Morellet's "first" works as shown at the Jeu de Paume. He is immediately enthralled by the idea of the system; through it, he has often said, he attempts both to keep arbitrary decisions to a minimum and to approach the position of a composer or an architect, in those cases when the artist's hand plays no role in realizing a work since others step in to execute it.

It's not at all surprising, therefore, that a relationship has often been retroactively pronounced between these early pieces by Morellet and some Conceptual or Minimalist art. In one of the exhibition catalogue essays, Thomas McEvilley makes this "discovery" in his turn-he sees Morellet's geometric exercises as clear precedents to those of such American artists as Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt--and regrets that because of an unfortunate lack of publicity (resulting, in McEvilley's account, from the fact that the French are the last remaining people on earth to resist "ferociously the use of a second universal language, English"), these precedents have not yet gained entry into art history books. One wonders what books he's been looking at. Morellet has no need for the kind of a posteriori recognition that is itself even more Americentric than the oversight it pretends to rectify. For one thing, these works, presumably validated by their supposed pre-Conceptual or pre-Minimalist character, are firmly inscribed in a long European tradition of systematism; Morellet has often emphasized the significance in his aesthetic development of the Dutch artists van Doesburg and Mondrian, as well as Swiss concrete art, especially Max Bill's, and even the Alhambra of Granada-all chapters in the history of art that have been written and rewritten in a number of languages, including English. But more important, Morellet's works can be appreciated in their own right. If any sort of sequence were to illuminate them (not merely endorse them), it should naturally be that which their author himself has given within his own oeuvre rather than some formal coincidence or intersection of process, all the more since, as a lover of classification, Morellet has made it a guiding principle of not only his work's development but also successive rereadings of his earlier creations.

From the squares and dashes of the early '50s to the use of [pi] as a generator of patterns that occupies Morellet today, the artist's own sequence has in fact brought forth new systems aplenty. After variations on the square, the right angle, and parallelism came a period of superimposed frameworks (well represented here by works of various sizes, techniques, and materials--wire mesh, paint, and adhesive tape, among others). The introduction of chance as artistic method followed, with canvases showing 40,000 small squares painted according to a pattern determined by numbers chosen randomly from the telephone book (the decisive factor being whether a number was odd or even). From these meticulous silk screen prints, modest in size (about thirty-one inches square), we passed--almost completely ignoring, as this anthology requires, the period of Morellet's participation in GRAV, the visual--art research group whose notable members included Julio Le Parc and Yvaral--directly to the '70s and to several other sets of works, where the artist's systems appear increasingly deranged by an undisguised taste for a kind of humor with roots in Alphonse Allais or Alfred Jarry. White or neon (which Morellet began using in 1963) dominates most of these often large-scale works, whose rules of execution are at times frankly a bit wacky. Thus, the aesthetic force behind the wall-size display of the fifteen white canvases that constitute Delacroix defigure (La Mort de Sardanapale) (Delacroix disfigured [Death of Sardanapalus]), 1989, results from a principle as ironic as it is simple: Where each face appears in a famous painting, the artist hung a white canvas known as Figure--literally, "face"--which was traditionally used for portraits and whose dimensions could vary but not its proportions. Morellet chose the sizes of his Figures to match the faces in Delacroix's work, thus conserving its original measurements.