SIMON HANTAÏ

Hantaï was the originator of the pliage (folding) technique, in which a canvas is crumpled and knotted, painted over, then spread out to reveal alternations between pigment and reserve. He produced the “last studio” works during his withdrawal from public life after representing France at the 1982 Biennale di Venezia (he declined to exhibit new work until 1998). Hantaï stapled many of the paintings atop one another in a studio installation that Baldassari deconstructs in her writing with stratigraphical precision, noting that Hantaï spent the interval from 1960 to 1982 “seeking, as Pollock had, to attain a boundlessness of painting via the continuous expansion of its formats. Now, by ‘padding’ the walls of the last studio with layers of painting-upon-painting, he seems to have achieved boundlessness via depth.”

The point of origin for the exhibition and its catalogue was Baldassari’s extensive original research into a body of iconic photographic portraits of Hantaï at work, taken by his close friend Édouard Boubat (1923–1999) at the artist’s own request. Boubat was an established Paris-based French photographer acknowledged as a representative of humanist photography alongside Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Doisneau, and Willy Ronis. In the 1970s, he was particularly famous for his international reporting for the Franco-American photo agency Rapho. In the context of the last studio, Boubat’s shots function as a guide to Hantaï’s series and sub-series, revealing aspects of their development, chronology, and display.