Morellet's ambitious undertaking, aiming at demystifying the function of the artist and the very nature of art, involved reducing as much as possible the number of arbitrary decisions needed for the creation of his systems—autonomous, mathematical systems with no other meaning than that of their own logic, “systems,” as he wrote himself, “as rigorous as they are absurd.”

Humorously pursuing his radical questioning of the traditional conventions of creation, Morellet, the iconoclast, not only rejects but makes fun of notions of composition and artistic choice. At the end of the 1950s, he played with perverting his ordered structures by inserting the controlled element of chance, coming either from the irrational number Pi, or digits from the phone book.

The series Répartition aléatoire de 40 000 carrés suivant les chiffres pairs et impairs d’un annuaire de téléphone [Random Distribution of 40, 000 Squares Using the Even and Odd Numbers of a Phone Directory] (very first one dates from 1960–series truly developed starting in 1961) follows a binary logic evoking digital technology well before it’s time. The series Lignes au hasard [Random Lines] follows the principle of the old naval battle game. Eager to clarify the exact method of construction, Morellet provided for each of these 10 lignes au hasard, which were published together in 1975, a photocopy of the preparatory drawing as well as of the page from the phonebook with the numbers that had provided the coordinates of the position of each line. The mysterious intercrossing is made available to be read as well as viewed, revealing a system as simple as it is playful.

Now on view at the gallery: