BERNARD RÉQUICHOT

Bernard Réquichot figures among the essential players in the 1950s artistic scene. Marked by ‘Surrealism’s second wind’, his production around 1955 is in line with the gestural and textural abstraction that occupied a preeminent place at the time. Mixing the material with a knife, weaving inextricable networks and allowing ‘graphic traces’ to invade the canvas, Réquichot seems to push painting to its absolute limits. His Reliquaries and his suspended rolled canvases present exacerbated expressions of this. Surpassing the framework of Informal Art, of which he is an eminent representative, Réquichot was quick to introduce collages into his painting. In the graphic domain, he invested the spiral motif with a near-hypnotic function in impressive inks on paper underscored by white gouache. Closely related to illegible writing, which is not unrelated to the artist’s literary production, these motifs translate into sculpture in the form of aggregates of polystyrene rings. Réquichot was a complex and tortured figure who took his own life shortly before his second solo exhibition organised by his gallerist, Daniel Cordier.