Gérard Gasiorowski - Centre George Pompidou

 

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The exhibition "C’est à vous Monsieur Gasiorowski !" is the first major monograph dedicated to this artist since his death in August 1986, and the most comprehensive presentation of the man many consider to be one of the most important French painters since the 1960s.

His journey is marked by a tireless desire to join what he called "the great river of Painting," meaning all the possibilities offered by painting considered in all its manifestations: knowledge, memory, myth, forms, and self-experience.

After studying at the School of Arts and Crafts, Gérard Gasiorowski (1930-1986) began to paint at a time when the expiring School of Paris offered few alternatives. He stopped from 1959 to 1964.

During this period, stimulated by the appearance of Pop Art in France, presented by the Sonnabend gallery, he resumed his activity and grouped his first works under the title "C’est à vous Monsieur Gasiorowski." The tone of this title clearly indicates the determined decision behind his entry into painting. The following year, in 1965, the artist undertook a second series entitled "L’approche" and engaged in a passionate reflection on the difficult relationship between image and painting. This period, from 1965 to 1973, little shown for twenty years, inaugurates the Centre Pompidou exhibition, leading him in eight years to a severe critique of representation and a renunciation of the canvas. The theoretical violence of his discourse on the image associates him with artists like Gerhard Richter or Andy Warhol. Seeming to consider the emotional impact of images as an insufficient condition to achieve "Painting," he then imposed on himself, in almost absolute social withdrawal, a long period of self-work that would take multiple forms.

The fruitfulness of this long eight-year silence represents the largest part of the exhibition. During this period, Gasiorowski painted on paper, completely renouncing the symbolic meaning of the canvas, perhaps considering that the time had not yet come to resume painting on canvas. This period gave rise to three major fictions, each with a symbolic function:

"La Guerre" (1973-74) is his way of realizing and representing the break with the world and the representation of the violence of his questioning about the possibilities of still making Painting.

"L’Académie" (1975-78) stages a tyrannical professor and the figures of the contemporary avant-garde condemned to do imposed exercises in the form of hundreds of hats. In fact, this academy can be read as the will to externalize his own work to enable its evaluation.

Finally, the ultimate fiction, "Kiga" (1976-80), which reverses "L’Académie" and is nothing other than "Painting." For several years, the artist dedicated all his activity to it and made thousands of offerings which, after this long meditation, after this integration of the history of painting and this indispensable self-transformation to be able to paint again, would allow him to return to the canvas.

The exhibition concludes with "Une pluie de peinture" (A Rain of Painting), meaning the large paintings symbolizing his reconciliation with himself and with a history of painting that runs seamlessly from the Lascaux bulls to today.