Home Shows “Georges Noël: ‘Palimpseste’”


VV8artecontemporanea presents "Georges Noël: 'Palimpseste'", a retrospective on the artist's 1960s. The exhibition, which will open on Friday 14 October from 6 p.m., continues the gallery's proposal to delve into the French artistic production of the mid-twentieth century, following the exhibition 'Les années Lumière, les années Sessantas de Gérard Schneider' held in 2020.

Around 10 oil on canvas works created by Noël in the late 1950s and early 1960s will be exhibited, a crucial moment for the artist, marking the decisive turning point of his poetics with the parable of 'abstract lyricism' from its beginnings to its slow demise, consecrating him forever among the greats of French and international Informal art, alongside Hans Hartung, Georges Mathiéu and Pièrre Soulages.

The lyrical abstraction to which the artist adhered in the second decade of his artistic activity, more than a pictorial movement, is a way of understanding painting, breaking with the past and in discontinuity with the avant-garde, in search of a synthesis that blossoms as a new plastic sense, a new conception of becoming, of living.

Noël's research is characterised by an attention to the language of signs, to hieroglyphics, to the graphic sign, in particular to pre-writing, to that moment charged with tension and mystery that precedes the synthesis between thought and word, between word and image, between phoneme and sign. The painter creates on the surface free signs of reflections and narratives of an emotional language.

"I arranged the side lines in a slightly helical pattern, as if to suggest that the movement starts on the left and moves upwards to the right. I arranged the stick lines more like doodles and tried to write them as quickly as possible to make them vibrate in multiple directions to express a rhythm."

The doodle, the hieroglyphic, represent for Noël an image that does not convey an idea, but reproduces a sound, a fragmentary, missing, sometimes disjointed discourse; a discourse that in some cases needs inclusions, additions, corrections, sometimes erasures and rewritings.

Art historian Margit Rowell writes of the artist: "Much fascinated by the anonymous 'Graffiti' on worn Parisian walls immortalised by the Hungarian photographer Brassai, his early paintings from 1957 to 1959 show the clear influence of Dubeffet in their dense, soft surfaces with earthy reflections His interest in graffiti can be seen in the grooves and scratches drawn spontaneously and obsessively."

Noël's works are exhibited in prestigious public and private collections internationally, from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to MoMA in New York.

The exhibition " Georges Noël: " Palimpseste " will be open from Saturday 15 October to Sunday 11 December 2022, Monday to Saturday from 10:00 to 13:00 and 16:30 to 19:30, or by appointment.