Though the beginning of his career was influenced by an abstract expressionism close to the post-war lyrical gestural language, Degottex accomplished a decisive reframing: the painting was no longer the place of an emotional display but became the field of an experience with line, rhythm and the void. 
That mutation fits into the context of an abstraction shaped by the issue of writing, in France with artists like Georges Mathieu and Henri Michaux, and in the United States with Cy Twombly. But when Mathieu extolled a calligraphic brilliance, while Michaux invented ‘inner’ alphabets, when Twombly fluctuated between graffiti and scrawl, Degottex chose a more pared-down, almost ascetic approach. In his work, the sign does not refer to any formed language: it doesn’t transcribe anything, doesn’t illustrate anything. It just happens.

The series of the years 1957-1964—often identified by titles evoking the line, the breath, the fragment—show the artist’s growing interest in scripts from the Far East, but without ever falling into formal imitation. Like many artists of his generation, Degottex was inspired by the Japanese and Chinese calligraphies, sensitive to the unity of the gesture and the mind they postulate. However, his relation to the Far East is less iconographic than structural: it’s about integrating the notion of active emptiness, of tension between broad and thin strokes, of temporality recorded in the drawn line itself. 
The Degottex sign is both the trace and its erasing. Traced with ink or oil highly diluted, scratched into the pictorial matter, it seems at times to almost disappear, as if the painting was withdrawing at the moment it appeared. The background is no longer just a support but a space of resonance. Reserve takes effect, it contains the gestural. The painting becomes the surface of a minimal, silent inscription. In this respect, his work is in dialogue with certain contemporary preoccupations of poetry and philosophy—the crisis of language, the attention paid to emptiness, to silence, to the erasure of the author. The sign no longer carries a stable meaning; it is vibration, rhythm, breath. It relates to a meditative experience of time. 

— Christian Alandete, curator of the exhibition