CLAUDE VIALLAT
October, 2025
Solo Show
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PARIS
35 AVENUE MATIGNON
75008, FRANCE
Dumas+Limbach is pleased to present “Claude Viallat, Répéter pour voir”, a solo exhibition in our Parisian gallery. This exhibition will be an opportunity to discover some of the artist's major works.
A key figure of the Supports/Surfaces movement, Claude Viallat was born in Nîmes in 1936.
It is in this sun-drenched southern city that his studio still stands, and where he continues to work. The southern light and the colors of his surroundings have always nourished his art.
In his youth, Viallat failed to obtain his baccalauréat. His father, eager for him to continue despite a nervous breakdown, steered him toward engineering studies, where he first encountered a hands-on, tinkering approach.
After a competitive exam, he entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier in 1955. Viallat initially turned toward figurative painting. In 1959, his studies were interrupted by military service. He was sent to Algeria until 1961. Upon his return, he resumed his training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied until 1963. This experience introduced him to the Parisian gallery scene, where major figures of American art came into view, for example, Robert Rauschenberg.
Viallat became fascinated by the use of new mediums, already introduced in France by the Nouveaux Réalistes, but even more so by monumental formats on the scale of transatlantic cities. The bold, saturated colors of American art stood in sharp contrast to the dull abstraction of the French school.
CLAUDE VIALLAT
2017/235, 2017
Acrylic on sheet
140 x 228 cm
The pattern is an inseparable element of the artist’s work.
Its origin lies in a method used by house painters in Mediterranean countries, who would dip a sponge into a bucket of blue lime and press it in a stamping motion onto the walls of kitchens. The craftsman’s touch is never far away.
Thus, in the summer of 1966, while cleaning his sponge in bleach, the corrosive liquid accidentally altered its shape. The emblematic motif was born. Around it, a genuine, serial iconography took form, one that he has been tirelessly developing for more than sixty years.
From its Mediterranean roots to questions of ornament and repetition, from the use of humble materials to the embrace of chance: everything is there.
CLAUDE VIALLAT
2008/275, 2008
Acrylic on fabric
94 x 100 cm
This form offers neither narration, nor center, nor composition in the classical sense. Applied with a stencil or a brush, it sets the rhythm of the surface while leaving the viewer’s gaze free to wander. The work does not assert itself as an image, but as an active surface, a concrete object where form, color, and material come together. Viallat represents the culmination of a career devoted to a single motif. He explains: “The notion of reiteration, of series, of repetition becomes a matter of necessity. […] A canvas – a piece – alone is nothing; it is the process – the system – that matters.”
Viallat’s work must therefore be understood as a principle, a concept, which he applies uniformly to all his material production. A craftsman of chance, Viallat demystifies the sacred role of the artist and of creative genius. The support and the surface are the primary elements of the painting. The artist strives to let them speak.
CLAUDE VIALLAT
1990/237, 1990
Acrylic on fabric
130 x 148 cm
When faced with a work by Claude Viallat, there is no story to read, no subject to recognize, no scene to interpret. The artist rejects all narration, all psychology, all symbolism. It is not about understanding; it is about seeing. Seeing a painting that claims nothing other than what it is.
For more than six decades, Claude Viallat has built a body of work of remarkable coherence, without ever giving in to sterile repetition or the temptation of spectacular evolution. What some have at times described as an obsession, he embraces as a form of fidelity to a founding intuition: to paint in complete freedom, to liberate painting from its historical constraints, to explore the infinite potential of a single gesture, a single motif, across endlessly renewed supports.
CLAUDE VIALLAT
2020/114, 2020
Acrylic on tarpaulin
135 x 206 cm
“One form among others and one form for all others”
Quotation from Claude Viallat
