DANIEL DEZEUZE

As early as the 1960s, Daniel Dezeuze, a founding member of the Supports/Surfaces group, foresaw this exponential evolution.

Since then he has sought to deconstruct the traditional media and materials of painting. Radical to the core, Daniel Dezeuze has used the stretcher as a tool for questioning and reassessing. Freed from the canvas, he flips paintings against the walls, playing with empty spaces and three-dimensionality: by going beyond the limits of artistic traditions, Daniel Dezeuze opens up a new space.

In the first part of this new exhibition, Daniel Dezeuze pays tribute, in his own way, to the art and paintings he loves: angles, brightly coloured frames, open-work surfaces. Halfway between painting and sculpture, his unclassifiable oeuvre lies ‘between between art, laid bare by the laying bare of the painting, and its relationship to space,’ explains Guy Tosatto.

Mirroring the publication by Skira and Galerie Templon of Daniel Dezeuze, Drawings, 1960–2018, a monograph dedicated to the artist’s different drawing periods (with texts by Olivier Kaeppelin and Pierre Manuel, 320 pages), the second part of the exhibition focuses on Daniel Dezeuze’s drawings.

Presented like the flesh on the bones of the first room, these works drawn in Italy, about Lascaux, the art of fortification and floating geometry, once again evoke the question of angles, open-work and the artist’s obsession with ‘capturing the uncapturable’. Through drawing, Daniel Dezeuze liberates himself of all weight and opens the door to lightness and pleasure: another way of seeing the world from a certain angle.

Born in 1942 in Alès, Daniel Dezeuze lives and works in the southern French port town of Sète. His work has been widely exhibited since the 1970s; a recent example is the major exhibition of his drawings held by FRAC Languedoc Roussillon in Montpellier in late 2015. His work has also recently been exhibited in the Cherry and Martin Gallery in Los Angeles and New York’s Canada Gallery (2014), MAMAC in Nice (2012), Centrale Electrique in Brussels (2009) and Musée Fabre in Montpellier (2009). In 2017, he took part in the Supports/Surfaces group exhibitions, Les origines exhibition at the Carre d’Art in Nimes and The Surface of the East Coast, From Nice to New York at the 109 in Nice, while the Musée de Grenoble held a major retrospective of his work the same year. His work is influencing an entire new generation of American painters and receives critical attention from across the Atlantic.