Michel Gauthier

This monograph describes the remarkable trajectory of the work of Jean Degottex (1918-1988): from analytical and processual radicalism to the pictorial avant-garde that emerged in the late 1960s and asserted itself in the following decade. This monograph describes the remarkable trajectory of the work of Jean Degottex (1918-1988): over the course of almost four decades, his painting evolved from lyrical abstraction, of which he was a leading figure, to an analytical and processual radicalism that made it close to the pictorial avant-garde that emerged in the late 1960s and asserted itself in the following decade.In 1955, Degottex’s painting became an issue for André Breton, who saw in it a possible abstract outcome to automatism in painting. This attempt to affiliate lyrical abstraction with Surrealism was achieved by engaging Degottex’s work in a relationship with the Far East and Zen Buddhism, which paradoxically enabled him to transcend the expressive conception of lyrical abstraction in favor of a painting of signs and writing. Thus emancipated, from the mid-1960s onwards, from the aesthetics that had given birth to it, Degottex’s painting became animated by a tropism that was initially centrifugal, with spatialist accents, then centripetal, self-reflexive? it then devoted itself to the sensitive experimentation of its elementary constituents. Michel Gauthier’s book details the stages in this movement, from some of the highest achievements of informal lyricism to the pictorial materialism of the series that have marked the last fifteen years of production, from the transformation of a painting that expresses to a painting that expresses itself, and attempts to identify the underlying logic.