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A prolific self-taught painter, sculptor and installation artist, François Morellet has developed a singular and radical approach to geometric abstraction with a sense of irreverence and unpretentious humour.
His object-based paintings, neon and architectural installations, and site-specific works explored the creative potential of kinetic and pre-established systems, challenging the viewer’s understanding of perception and the physical picture plane.
Insisting that “art is frivolous even when it takes itself seriously”, he strove to produce art that was accessible to all, free of messages and meanings beyond its immediate content.
His discovery in the 1950s of Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s “Duo-collages” through his friend Ellsworth Kelly prompted him to introduce the notion of chance as a central principle, creating works based on random numbers found in his local telephone book or from the infinite sequence of decimals of the number pi.
François Morellet’s use of grids and screens is also a reference to Piet Mondrian and his neo-plastic compositions made up of variations of straight lines and planes.
He plays skilfully with Mondrian’s legacy, gradually tilting his grids and animating the canvas with a bewitching mesh of diagonal lines. In so doing, he subverts what he describes as the “sacrosanct horizontality-verticality” of the Western pictorial tradition, by introducing effects of tilt and rotation that disorientate the viewer.
François Morellet refers to his works as ‘picnics’ to which each viewer is invited to contribute his or her own meanings and interpretations.
