Untitled

Georges Mathieu is the Founder of Lyrical Abstraction, which he relentlessly promoted throughout the World. He started painting in 1942, and quickly rejected standardized abstraction, strongly believing that abstraction needed to be freed of form and constraints. His works carry a crystalized tension where shapes evaporate in favour of signs growing and bursting within the composition. Qualified as the "Western Calligrapher", he uses signs as a new language for creativity, in a desire to move away from the representation of images. Untitled (Lot 308) was painted in 1954, just a few years before he started travelling the world as an advocate for action painting and Lyrical Abstraction. However, by 1954, he had already fully embraced what Michel Tapié coined as "other art", and our work here is a beautiful example of Mathieu's artistic language. In an effort to make the process of creation available to the public eye, he would paint large canvases in open air, in an act of utter freedom, elevating his art to a state of perfect symbiosis between the painting and the painter. Here, without having sketched beforehand, he applies colour directly from the tube onto black paper. Signs are juxtaposed on the surface, by way of several layers of red, white and black. Unlike traditional Eastern calligraphy, his signs convey no specific meaning, yet still represent a tool to express his own aesthetic philosophy. Colours are fully integrated in his language, where the blackness of the paper provides a new interpretation on how colours interact with one another, the colour black becomes an integral part of the composition, used to reveal and disguise as the artist pleases.