CADERE | RISTORI 1970: ANDRÉ CADERE | FRANÇOIS RISTORI

Systems of painting
François Ristori (1936-2015) and André Cadere (1934-1978) belong to a very specific generation of French artists - all of them painters - who, from the late 1960s onwards, set about challenging the practice of painting in the broadest sense. This ranged from the systematic deconstruction of the medium - canvas stretched on a frame - without abandoning it altogether, as some of them would later return to it, to a theoretical and practical reflection on their work and its context. For all of them, it's a question of taking a fresh look at the act of painting, revisiting its foundations and inscribing them in a most radical approach, minimalist in appearance and conceptual in obedience.
The aim here is not to look at the history of the Supports-Surfaces group or the group that brought together Buren, Mosset, Parmentier and Toroni at the turn of the 1970s, but to take a brief look at the generation that produced these two movements, considered to be the last two historical avant-gardes of the twentieth century in France. As well as the inherent radicalism of their approach, there is another aspect that stands out: the unchanging consistency of their basic concept. These include the work of Claude Viallat, Niele Toroni, Claude Rutault, André Cadere, Daniel Buren and, of course, François Ristori, one of the pioneers of the field, with his first Traces-Formes dating from 1967-1968. To varying degrees, they have all remained fundamentally faithful to the principles that underpin their work, whatever the medium or surface used. Not least because the radical nature of their approach - whether to a form, an imprint, a colour match, a system of permutations or alternating stripes - led them to broaden their proposals by developing and deepening concepts such as protocols, methods, processes or systems. These are expressed in the form of combinations, articulations, variations or repetitions, thus multiplying the possibilities of their work while respecting the initial paradigm of their statements.

To define his artistic approach, François Ristori speaks of Proposition-Peinture, while André Cadere simply refers to a "work". For Ristori, it's a question of what he calls "Traces-Formes of hexagonal appearance appearing together, alternately in blue, red and white, until they cover the entire surface". Cadere, for his part, defines his work as a "Barre de bois rond" (round wooden bar) made up of wooden segments whose length is equal to their diameter.These segments, painted in different colours, are assembled according to a system of permutations, each of which contains an error. In his case, it is an earlier work that is exhibited here, among the various hinges that took him from canvas to the round wooden bar, synonymous with total freedom from any hanging constraint.

Aside from the formal differences between their works, they have a great deal in common, based on a number of reflections: on the practice of painting, on the use of colour, on the system for developing the work, on the materiality of the support and on the way in which it is exhibited. Apart from their friendship, another point of similarity between them was their individual collaboration with the Yvon Lambert gallery, where they would, however, be reunited only once, at a group exhibition of French artists in New York in 1976 (1).

— Bernard Marcelis