La Vie Communale (Communal Life)

Calligraphic writing curls across aqueous pools of molten blue and purple in Georges Mathieu’s La Vie Communale. Painted in 1959, La Vie Communale wonderfully exemplifies the artist’s hypnotic and lyrical abstractions which were seemingly governed by the power and propulsion of their own materials. Mirrored across a hidden vertical axis, the action of La Vie Communale is momentarily arrested, a ‘caesura in the momentum’ of the painting’s dynamism (D. Stella’s ‘La vie communale, 1959’, Georges Mathieu: 1948-1969, exh. cat., Galleria del Centre Culturel Français de Milan, 2011, p. 102). Influenced by the daubs and splotches of Tachisme as well as the conceptual performativity of the Japanese Gutai group, Mathieu pioneered a gestural abstraction that veered towards a performance, developing an aesthetic rooted in the spontaneous gesture; this blend of visual imagery rooted in physical gestures anticipated works by Yves Klein and Lucio Fontana, among others. A relentless globetrotter, La Vie Communale was painted during Mathieu’s travels in Brazil in 1959; he saw the country’s culture as ‘the most original, the most alive’ (G. Mathieu quoted in D. Stella’s ‘Sans titre. Composition, 1959’, Georges Mathieu: 1948-1969, exh. cat., Galleria del Centre Culturel Français de Milan, 2011, p. 98). In its wild silvery curlicues, the present work embodies a similar vibrancy. La Vie Communale effervesces with life.