The work of Louis Cane (Beaulieu-Sur-Mer, 1943 - Monaco, 2024) challenges artistic conventions by redefining the way we look at painting. A founding member of the Supports/Surfaces collective (1969-1972) alongside Claude Viallat, Daniel Dezeuze, and Jean-Pierre Pincemin, he was undoubtedly at the heart of the movement through his Papiers découpés (1967) and Toiles découpées (1971), which left a lasting mark on the group's origins. In the early 1970s, marginalized in the group's theoretical considerations, which were expressed in particular in the journal Peinture, cahiers théoriques, Cane did not withdraw but became even more radical. This intellectual tension led to the creation of the Sol/Mur series (1972-1974), in which he pushed the pictorial deconstruction characteristic of the movement he rejected to its peak, its breaking point. Color is important to Cane, allowing him to "pictorially transcend the real limits of the canvas", as he himself puts it. In this first phase of his career, Cane produced works that analyzed pictorial language by eliminating traditional elements: untensioned canvases, tinted surfaces, modular works, and experiments with color as an autonomous entity.
From the 1980s onwards, he explored the complex issues of pictorial space, optical effects, and the interplay of light and color, moving towards a return to figurative painting and an exploration of sculpture. Cane's figurative art is never academic, but is imbued with a reflection on art history, color, and the relationship between image and surface. His series Les Déluges (1982) and Les Ménines (1984) reinterpret the sometimes tormented, sometimes playful figures of Michelangelo and Diego Velázquez's eponymous works, while drawing on the Cubists' characteristic deconstruction of bodies and perspectives. Later, in the 1990s, he worked on the spatial and expressive characteristics of color, producing numerous Nymphéas, balancing between figuration and abstraction.
In 1995, during an exhibition at the MIC - International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, organized in collaboration with Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. and curated by Franco and Roberta Calarota, Louis Cane reaffirmed his need to explore and challenge the established order of styles, trends, and schools by taking an interest in this medium, which he had never before worked with on such a large scale. Louis Cane then sculpted a series of works also based on the themes of play and references to art history, once again taking up the figures of the Meninas while also focusing on those of the Venuses. As with color, in sculpture Louis Cane maintains the same almost "analytical" attention to the material, treating form as a tactile experience rather than an ideal to be achieved. And if the form takes on the appearance of a body, it is on the surface that a direct trace of the gesture remains: imprints, scratches, thickenings, lumpy areas. The agitated surfaces and irregular volumes are reminiscent of certain baroque tensions, where the material seems to push itself towards something higher, animated by an energy that unites desire and injury.
In the early 2000s, a new series between painting and sculpture reaffirmed his need for research: Resins. Featuring sculptures depicting picture frames made of colored resin onto which other multicolored resin stains are applied, this series symbolically unites Cane's perpetual research with his roots in the Supports/Surfaces collective, one of whose formal research projects was to question the medium of the artwork.
In the early 2000s, a new series took form between painting and sculpture, reaffirmed his need for research: Resins. Featuring sculptures depicting picture frames made of colored resin onto which other multicolored resin stains are applied, this series symbolically unites Cane's perpetual research with his roots in the Supports/Surfaces collective, one of whose formal research projects was to question the medium of the artwork.
The first acquisitions by the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris date back to 1973, and his work is held in the permanent collections of the world's most important museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the MoMA - Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Monographic exhibitions were held in Denmark and Canada in 1976, at the Louisiana Museum and the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, respectively. The following year, in 1977, the Centre Pompidou, which had opened a few months earlier, held the first solo exhibition dedicated to him in France, thus confirming his place at the heart of the avant-garde and the Supports/Surfaces movement, from which the series presented were taken. That same year, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York dedicated an exhibition to him. In 1978, he had a solo exhibition at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, and in 1979, another at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Strasbourg. Over the following decades, several exhibitions cemented the status of Louis Cane and his work, including: the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence (1983), the Museum of Toulon (1987), the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts in Santander (1991), the Deutsch Belmont Foundation in Lausanne (1991), the Statengalerie in The Hague (1992), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (1992), the Centre Pompidou (1992), the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris with the Nymphéas series (1994), and the Takaoka Museum of Modern Art (1995). He opened the new century with an exhibition of the Supports/Surfaces group at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, followed by the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo (2000), the Shaanxi History Museum in China (2001), and the group exhibition "Recto Verso" at the Prada Foundation in Milan (2015).