After inviting Louis Cane in the 1990s to produce an entire exhibition of ceramics for the MIC - International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza (Italy), the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. presents an exhibition at its Paris venue that aims to highlight the French master's innovative research, focusing on emblematic works from the 1960s and 1970s that marked his career as founder of the Support/Surface group, including radical masterpieces such as Papiers Decoupés, Toilés Decoupées or Sol/Mur and interpretations of art from the past, to which he has devoted himself since the 1980s, when he also developed an interest in sculpture. The unique ceramic pieces - created for the exhibition at the museum, produced by Franco and Roberta Calarota, founders of our Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m., which has also had a branch in Paris since 2024 - are an admirable example of his pursuit of "artistic pleasure", which he pursued first through colour and here through terracotta throughout his career.
The exhibtion is supported by a text and the scentific advise of Matthieu Poirier, art historian in charge of the modern and contemporary art's exhibitions at Cité de l'Archicteture et du Patrimoine in Paris.
For Louis Cane, colour is a 'primordial necessity' that constitutes the very substance of a constantly evolving style of painting. One of the founders of Support/Surface, Louis Cane's art is innovative and radical, with works such as Papiers Découpés, cut-out and interwoven papers, and Toile Tamponées, both from 1967 and featured in the exhibition. While in Papiers Découpés colour gives a repetitive rhythm to the composition, in Toile Tamponnée colour is rejected, serving only as a support for a reflection on the status of the painter and the means of painting. Louis Cane makes clear his desire to neutralise the painter's gesture and his know-how, which is then compensated for in other works by the stamp-like repetition of his signature. His exploration of the relationship between colour and gesture becomes even more radical in the Sol / Mur series, created between 1971 and 1974, where colour is sprayed directly onto the canvas from a spray gun, emphasising the distance the artist wants to establish between his body and the work. On the other hand, these works bear witness to a new affirmation of colour, which acquires its autonomy; a vibrant colour, modulated by means of a gradient, which plays with its effects added to those of its spatial diffusion, physically marked by the strip of canvas that acts as a background or spreads across the floor. The question of the insertion and expansion of colour in space, raised by artists such as Matisse, Rothko, Newman or the protagonists of the American Colour Field movement, finds an echo and a possible resolution in these works by Louis Cane. Similarly, the artist also questions the concept of sfumato, which at first glance speaks to us of colour, but above all of black - the absence of colour - and white - the sum of colours. These reflections are synthesised in the Toile Découpée series, which does not merely place colour in space, but deconstructs the traditional surface of the canvas to create new geometries, new spaces and new surfaces.
In the early 1980s, Louis Cane felt the need to return to figurative art and began his research by studying art history. This return to figurative art required the artist to adopt a new approach to colour, linked to reflections on composition and its use in the construction of space. His study of Velázquez's Las Meninas and Impressionist works, including Monet's Water Lilies, revealed the need to reflect on the optical effects of colour and light, in search of a “pictorial pleasure”, as he himself defines it in the catalogue of the 1994 exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie, which produces a “pleasure of colour” and which he achieves by aerating, relaxing and varying the outline and appearance of colour to the maximum. This return to figuration, to the pleasure of art, is expressed to the fullest in his ceramic sculptures with the Venus, Menines and Femmes sur le balançoire, created at the invitation of the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. for the major exhibition at the MIC – International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza (Italy), which also took place in 1995, immediately after the Paris museum exhibition. Louis Cane had just finished painting the Water Lilies canvases on display in Paris and was already moving on to working with terracotta with the same instinct that led him to seek the joy of the material and no longer painting. After all, Louis Cane moves from the material ‘colour’ to colour as an expression of a feeling, because what interests him, the common denominator of all his art, is that colour is ‘plastically in its place’. In this, sculpture allows him to render colour three-dimensionally and thus becomes a tactile experience rather than an ideal to be achieved. If, in sculpture, terracotta is modelled to take on the appearance of a body, it is on the surface of the material that a direct trace of the gesture remains: imprints, scratches, thickenings, irregular areas. The agitated surfaces and irregular volumes are reminiscent of certain Baroque tensions, where the material seems to push towards something higher, animated by an energy that combines desire and wound.
The exhibition concludes with Resines, the latest experiment in chronological order dating back to the 2000s, consisting of canvases made of resin and metal mesh, which, when deconstructed, reveal their structure.
With this exhibition, the Galleria d'Arte Maggiore g.a.m. reconnects with a discourse that began 30 years ago on the art of one of the great protagonists of the avant-garde of the 1960s, presenting all his innovative and still relevant work. The exhibition will then be presented in a more extensive version in Italy.
