PHILIPPE DECRAUZAT – MICHEL PARMENTIER

The exhibition formulates a dialogue between the artist from the gallery Philippe Decrauzat (Lausanne, 1974) and the historical French painter Michel Parmentier (Paris, 1938-2000), whose work had never been exhibited in Spain before. The idea of control is very present in the work of both artists, whether in the creative process –especially in the case of Parmentier- or in the underlying discourse –in Decrauzat’s proposal-. Through the juxtaposition of the pieces of both artists, the show tries to interpellate the viewer about this and other possible convergences and divergences in shape and content between their works.

Philippe Decrauzat’s Fragments are inspired by the grids that Moholy-Nagy used to structure information -text and images- in his books. The artist shifts the focus from the content to the form to indicate how the visual structures direct and control the ways of seeing. As usual in his work, Decrauzat updates a plastic element of the Avant-Garde to reflect on issues related to contemporary ways of seeing: in this case, the shapes of the canvases evoke the line our eyes use to draw when browsing a web page. The look, as the artist has researched, tends to scan the page following a line formally similar to F. The Fragments here exposed, besides being a sort of “found abstractions”, would compose a graphic representation of the screen reading that takes the shape of a letter and represents a relationship with time: F for fast reading. They are the signs of our interfaces that structure and organize our perceptions and our relationship with language.

Michel Parmentier (Paris, 1938), firmly determined to break with the representation and with the hierarchy between the background and the figure, began to paint horizontal bands in 1965. Soon he became interested in the idea of ​​the fold, so that his horizontal stripes began to appear as a result of folding the support before painting and unfolding it later. In 1967 he co-founded the BMPT group with Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Olivier Mosset.

In the first years, the color of the painting used by Parmentier changed every year (blue in 1966, gray in 1967, red in 1968). After that, as a subversive act, he stopped painting for a lapse of fifteen years. In September 1983, he painted again, wearing black. Three years later, he changed the canvas for tracing paper and began to paint with oils and pastels, this technique being what he kept until his death in 2000.

Throughout his career, Parmentier produced a total of only 171 works; the whereabouts of 50 of them is not known. During the period in black and white (1983-86), he made 23 paintings, of which only 16 are located.