Arman - Vicky David Gallery

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“I started as a painter … I had a physical, practical need to physically touch the paint. I found this
system of capturing the paint as it comes from the tube, fixing it in Plexiglas or polyester resin –
it becomes an object. Paint becomes object. I had lots of fun with that. I made monochrome works,
and others very colourful: I remade the painter.”
Arman, “L’archéologie du futur” interview with Daniel Abadie, (Cat. Jeu de Paume, 1998)
The artist was indeed a painter by training, but by 1955 he had abandoned the brush for the
stamp, applying it to the surface of paper or canvas with “automatic” gesture. Influenced by great
figures of the earlier avant-gardes, among them Schwitters, Picasso and Nikolaas Werkman
(a typographer close to De Stijl), Arman would in 1958 also incorporate the large format
and all–over composition of American Abstract Expressionism into his own artistic language.
In 1957, while in close contact with the concrete music milieu, Arman began to use objects covered
in paint that left the trace of their passage across the canvas: these were the Allures d’objets,
the ‘Gait of Objects’ works. In the course of these researches the object gradually began to impose
itself within the pictorial frame, more particularly through the quantitative. From then on, the
artist made the object part of his process of creation, seeing it as a “plastic fact.” The notorious
Poubelles (Trashcans) thus present rubbish as an art material, locating Arman within a decisively
post-modern approach.
To accompany the Arman exhibition, the Centre’s Children’s Gallery will offer an interactive
workshop for children of three years and upwards, organised around aspects of the artist’s work.
Object and gesture will serve as key themes, bringing together Arman’s artistic innovation with
the sensuous experience of the child. Absorbed in this “poetical and contemporary factory”
conceived by artist-designer Adrien Rovero, children will be able to explore together, through
their own senses, the distinctive techniques that Arman uses (the stamp, the transsection of
objects, the photofit), bringing a fresh eye to bear on the world around them.
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