Untitled (blue/purple/blue), 2008

Basel 2018
Untitled (blue/purple/blue)

Massimodecarlo, galerie lange + pult

Painting
Acrylic on canvas
1800.0 x 200.0 x 5.0 (厘米)
708.7 x 78.7 x 2.0 (吋)
Olivier Mosset, once a member of the famous BMPT group (with Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni, and Michel Parmentier, who sought to democratize art through radical procedures giving the art object more importance than its authorship), is nowadays widely recognized for his research into the future of painting through geometrical abstraction and monochromes. Dating from 2008, Untitled (blue/purple/blue), does not, however, represent a total break with his early work, but is to be regarded as a restart or a representation in his quest to blur the margins of art. Installed like a huge blow-up of a colored variation of the ample monochromatic canvases he painted in the early 1980s or the large-size panels he showed in 1990 at the Swiss Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, the immense two-tone canvas reconsiders the intellectual property of his early monochromes. While the work tends to escape historical determinations, playing with our expectations and disrupting the rules, it suggests the impact of the perpetual mise en abyme that Mosset applies to his own practice.