François Morellet et la scène géométrique française des années 1950 : du formalisme à la formativité.

Abstract

In the early 1950s, François Morellet embarked on a radical quest. He sought new working methods, ones that were no longer subject to the artist’s whims but to external constraints. Self-taught and based in Maine-et-Loire (western France) but not isolated from the French art scene, he drew on non-Western abstract sources, the new generation of foreign artists active in Paris and the geometric art of his time for his minimal, restrained painting, generated by elementary, playful “systems”. Magnifying the making, the morphogenetic process, rather than the form or the composition, he thus laid the first milestones of a paradigm change that would soon emerge in the field of art, exalting the underlying elements of abstraction : systematism, processual, minimalism, kineticism, as well as retinal and the relational.

Keywords

• abstract art
• concrete art
• geometric art
• minimal art
• kinetic art
• poietics