Surface(s) / Prise(s): Noël DOLLA, Sam FALLS, Ryan FOERSTER, Christian JACCARD, Fabian KNECHT, Guillaume LEBELLE, Oscar MURILLO, Bernard PAGES, Patrick SAYTOUR, Astrid SVANGREN, Claude VIALLAT, Hannah WHITAKER

Surface(s) / Prise(s) or : The making of an artwork

Towards the end of the 1960's, after the BMPT experiments and in reaction to the New Realists who used the waste of our consumer society as medium, the members of the "Supports/Surfaces" movement meant to go back to what Roland Barthes could have defined as the lowest level of painting. To deconstruct painting and sculpture implied - in echo to the post-structuralist school of thought - revealing what was inherent to the making of an artwork : its frame, its canvas, its chassis. This denunciation takes three distinctive forms :
- Refusal of a painting as a "window" (Alberti) and its "surface" as an illusionistic backing : the shape itself is not an image and shouldn't be seen as such.
- Refusal of the painting as the artist's subjectivity projection surface : to work the backing directly so that an "image" will appear that wasn't initially planned, however one shouldn't associate it either to the mysterious powers of the creative act. Therefore any aim at anything or any projection of a subjective image contradicts its fundamental function.  
- Refusal of all previous painting that would hide its backing: the artistic process is the recording, the setting or the repeated affixing and its interaction with the backings.