Galerie Christophe Gaillard is pleased to present a second exhibition of Georges Noël’s work in Paris. The gallery has represented him in France since 2022 with the support of Margit Rowell and the artist’s family.
To celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the artist’s birth, the gallery proposes a pairing that is both self-evident and novel, showing around 20 of Georges Noël’s pieces in conjunction with the historical paintings of Jean Dubuffet.
The intuitive visitor route comprises four sections, allowing a number of chronological overlaps while recalling the historical foundations of this dialogue: Georges Noël invented his own pictorial language by first confronting that of Jean Dubuffet.
In 1956, Georges Noël installed his first Parisian workshop at 89 rue de Vaugirard, in Sibyle Boffard’s apartment where a number of her friend Jean Dubuffet’s paintings were on display. His encounter with this work had a significant impact on the personal journey of the young painter who first tackled what he calls “exercises in style”. Georges Noël soon realised that Dubuffet “understood everything” because “the subject is the vehicle”[1]. Thus began his research into medium, first through painting alone and later through the invention of a technique and materiality unique to his pieces: a blend of polyvinyl acetate (a particularly strong glue once dry), sand or crushed flint and pure pigments that he soon named his pictorial “magma”.
The aim of this exhibition is not only to demonstrate Jean Dubuffet’s influence on Georges Noël, 23 years his junior, but most significantly to make free and original connections between their work to gain new perspectives and renew the critical discourse.
Spontaneously, we decided to pair Dubuffet’s series of Murs lithographs, created in 1950 to accompany Guillevic’s poetic texts, with some of Georges Noël’s pieces on canvas and paper – to observe their commonalities in terms of symbols incised in material, writing and graffiti. What Noël calls “the magical energy of writing” appeared in his experiments on the medium from 1956; an automatic technique that seems to trace back to the origins of writing and the unconscious in the spirit of cave art.
The pieces in the exhibition revolve around a Grand palimpseste très ancien (1959), an oil on canvas covering 200 x 200 cm, which hangs at the heart of the space. Packed with symbols, the piece creates a “palimpsest” with the thickness of the painting echoing that of time and memory.
Thus, the second part of the journey through the gallery intersects the strong material component of paintings from Georges Noël’s first Parisian period (including Sans titre, oil and paste on paper, 1956; Palimpseste, emulsions and oils on canvas, 1957; Palimpseste organique, emulsions, oils and pigments on canvas, 1958; Accumulations de signes, oil on canvas, 1959) with Jean Dubuffet’s figurative work from 1952 where shapes stand out in a proliferation of thick, textured material.
From almost contemporary connections to anachronistic comparisons, the exhibition brings together Dubuffet’s Texturologies and Phénomènes du Sol with Noël’s Nuits and Cosmogonies (1980–1996). Following a thrilling temporal and spatial inversion, their work is particularly congruent.
Finally, the exhibition draws to a close in an open space where Dubuffet’s Non lieux (mid-1980s) join the moving and sinuous lines of Noël’s first paintings (Sans titre, mixed technique on paper, 1957; Palimpseste organique, oil on canvas, 1957) through to the dissolution of the pictorial space with three-dimensional work from the 1980s (such as Bouclier, polyvinyl acetate, sand, pigments, string, metal on wood, 1983). Here, the connection between the two painters is not simply formal – it takes on a metaphysical tone.
Armance Léger
[1] The quotations are taken from a previously unseen interview with Georges Noël and his assistant Ezter Gyarmathy from the mid 1980s (Archives Georges Noël).
