What came after Op art?

Associated media

‘Post-Op’
Perceptual Gone Painterly 1958–2014

Curated by Matthieu Poirier
Galerie Perrotin, Paris / 8 March 8 –19 April 2014

‘Post-Op’ opens this evening at Galerie Perrotin, Paris.

The title ‘Post-Op’, which stands for ‘post-operative’ and ‘post-optical’, seeks to define a little-known pictorial movement. Sinceits beginnings in the 1950s to its more recent ramifications, thismovement is the result of a constant dialogue between twoantagonistic principles of abstraction: the systematic, precise geometry of Optical art as a generator of visual phenomena, and the expressionist or informal highlighting of the operations, traces, wanderings and other painterly accidents that are inherent to a work’s execution. Numerous paintings, wall drawings and other works on paper by over 20artists, who have been invited by curator Matthieu Poirier at the gallery, have been borrowed from collections or produced for the occasion.

These creations stem from very different periods, protocols andimaginations, but they are characterized by a number of aspects: graphic approximations in the work of Michael Scott, Nicolas Roggy or Florian and Michael Quistrebert, a particular chromatic range – whether restricted, as in Richard Wright’s work, or fluorescent in piecesby Manfred Kuttner and Philip Taaffe, and by Piero Dorazio’srhythmical weaving of the visual plane. The paintings shown all offer a critical response to the absolute, neutral geometry of Op art: the frame is shaped or hollowed in works by Blair Thurman, Tillman Kaiser, John Tremblay and Julian Hoeber, and even dispensed with by  Sol LeWitt, whose wall-drawing features several errors and imprecisions, while Louise Bourgeois’ canvases, cut up and stitched back together, create a spidery tangle of targets.

Dieter Roth   creates an interpenetration of grids and sfumato (smoky effect), while Claudia Comte makes silk-screen prints with a chainsaw and Dan Walsh weaves together the passages of the brush on the canvas.

In every scenario, accident and irregularity play a very precise role: by rooting the gaze in the particularities of detail, these works consciously disturb the vibratory and hypnotic continuum of the whole. Likewise, the frequently sensual imperfection of the graphic act reveals the irreversibly material nature of this ‘optical’ art, which persists as an object. This is seen in the work of Richard Wright (2009 Turner Prize winner), whose erased grids are only on the borders of perceptibility, Heinz Mack, who spreads or rubs graphic material, Kazuko Miyamoto, who atomizes lines and spots to make them radiate in space, Emilie Ding, who blacks out with a graphite pencil tip huge mandalas inherited from Bridget Riley,  or Éric Baudart and his graph paper, whose surface is scoured with a scalpel, line after line.

In his exhibition ‘Post-Painterly Abstraction’ at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, critic Clement Greenberg  considered the Optical art of Frank Stella or Kenneth Noland to be a reaction to the Abstract Expressionism  of Jackson Pollock   or Mark Rothko. The works in ‘Post-Op’ show that an opposite perspective exists; they question the immaterial primacy and the mechanical precision of Op art by reverting to the body – here in the surgical or visceral sense of the term.

Beyond its diversity, the body of work brought together for ‘Post-Op’ proves that a border zone exists between two apparently contradictory aesthetics, and also that art history itself is the product of exchanges rather than of territories and, moreover, that Optical art, which some people saw as a death sentence for painting when it first appeared in the late 1950s/early 1960s, paradoxically seems to have served as a contribution to its development.

Matthieu Poirier is a Doctor of Art History, a former teacher at Paris-Sorbonne University and a resident at the Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art. He recently co-curated ‘Dynamo’ at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais and co-organized the 2011 Julio Le Parc  retrospective at Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Galerie Perrotin
76 Rue De Turenne
75003 Paris

Nearest Metro station: Saint-Sébastien Froissart