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Art Shatters Boundaries: Saytour's Radical '70s Experiments
5 Mar
Summary
- Artists took paintings outside galleries, challenging the definition of art.
- Saytour's work explored folding, wrapping, burning for new pictorial results.
- Supports/Surfaces movement redefined French avant-garde art in the 1970s.
In the 1970s, Patrick Saytour and fellow artists pushed the boundaries of painting, taking their creations beyond gallery walls. Their approach dramatically redefined what art could be, with works laid out in fields or suspended in courtyards.
Saytour, known for his poetic nature, observed how these liberated artworks gained independent lives. He specifically explored everyday actions like folding, wrapping, and burning to achieve novel pictorial outcomes.
These radical experiments, developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were part of the influential Supports/Surfaces movement. This group emerged from art schools in Southern France, including Saytour's hometown of Nice.
Saytour's early works, featuring sculptures of wooden battens wrapped in rope or dyed strips tied with string, are now being showcased. These pieces from 1968-1970 are noted for their enduring radicalism.
The Supports/Surfaces movement, officially forming in 1970, was a brief but impactful period in French art history. It was deeply influenced by the revolutionary spirit of the late 1960s, including the May 1968 events.
Though the movement itself disbanded quickly, its avant-garde activities continued into the mid-1970s. Saytour, who passed away in 2023 at 87, is remembered as a pillar of contemporary French art.
