Claude Viallat - Bulls (English Edition)

Since then he has eschewed stretchers or frames. This repeated shape has become Viallat's trademark and signature and figures on all kinds of surfaces, from rugs, tents, curtains and other loose fabrics, endlessly repeating itself, yet always creating something new.

"For a long time, I believed that Claude Viallat was the official painter of bullfighting. I saw him at the time of the ferias in Arles or Nîmes, as we could recognize his photographer friend Lucien Clergue or the writer Alain Montcouquiol. I heard people greet him and call him "master." How not to be impressed by the posters he was making for Sevilla or some other large plaza de toros. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I knew little about his powerful abstract work at the time. Viallat, for me, was the one who, like Picasso de Toros y Toreros, knew how to draw bulls, how to capture the instant, the light, the musicality of a race under his pencil or brush strokes. Claude
Viallat, in short, was like Picasso in his day. It's not false. But Viallat is above all ... Viallat! That of forms, Supports / Surfaces, large tarpaulins, military or civilian, covered with large colored plates as a metonymy of the artist's cosmogony. Since the end of 1950s and the start of his long career as a painter, Claude Viallat
is known by his sponges, shapes cut from old cardboard calendars, and his talent as a colourist. His works without frame are hung on the picture rails of the largest museums. " Aymeric Mantoux