Jean DegottexSigne-Boule IV
1975
Ink and pencil on paper
Signed, dated and titled on the back
19.69 x 25.2 in ( 50 x 64 cm )
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Certificat

Certificate from the Comité Degottex

Provenance

Private Collection, France

Artwork's description

At the beginning of the 70s, Jean Degottex abandoned the brush in order to explore the effects of matter. The ball, as well as all the objects picked up or recovered by the artist, is an object of potential meditation. This is perhaps why Degottex has always unconsciously kept the scraps of his work and in particular those used for the Media series. The signs are traced by the imprint of strips of paper rolled into a ball, inked, mimed and drawn with a pencil. “ Jean Degottex does not seek to leave painting. He seeks, from an economy of means, to start again and to reinvent it. He does not cease to reinterpret the means of painting. He is not a man of habit, he is a man of reinterrogation “.

Pierre Watt

Artist's biography

Jean Degottex, is a French painter, born in 1918 in Sathonay-Camp. At the end of the Second World War, Degottex met painters belonging to the Lyrical Abstraction movement, for which he adhered.

The first gallery to exhibit him in 1949 is Denise René. In 1951, he received the Kandinsky Prize.

In 1955 he met André Breton, who introduced him to Zen thought and oriental calligraphy, in particular that of China. It is from this discovery that Degottex's artistic research work will take another turn: all his next works will be influenced by surrealist automatic writing and by the essential principles of Zen philosophy.

The realization of a table takes place thus, the artist plunges into a meditative state which then allows him to apply dark colors on the bottom of his canvas, which thereafter, this state of meditation allows to prepare the gesture creative.

Jean Degottex died in 1988 in Paris.

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