M/M: ROBERT MALAVAL | OLIVIER MOSSET
Overview
M/M, ROBERT MALAVAL | OLIVIER MOSSET
Pauline Pavec gallery has taken up the challenge of bringing together two non-conformist artists whose acidic reinterpretation of pictorial modernism has had a profound impact on the history of French painting since the 1960s, by inviting Olivier Mosset, a proponent of monochrome and ground zero, to respond in an original way to the famous series of glittery canvases by Robert Malaval, the marginal and accursed troublemaker who died prematurely in 1980. 

 

The exhibition highlights two of Malaval's historic paintings covered in glittering materials with a metallic sheen. One is hard-edge, built around a diagonal delimiting two-tone planes stained with dark scratches, while the other, set against a lyrical, dark background, features a horizontal frieze punctuated by a series of crosses whose negation is reminiscent of the nihilism of Mosset's famous circles. Faced with this antithetical profusion of styles and effects, Mosset has designed two impeccably minimalist works especially for this exhibition. Devoid of all facture, composition, motif or flatness, his two-dimensional objects - ersatz paintings - have been created using a 'pictorial' arsenal that is atypical, to say the least: In the same way that Malaval used anti-artistic means to create his canvases (brooms, fans, hoovers, glitter found at the bazaar), Mosset follows in his footsteps by borrowing a technique well known to bikers, whose libertarian spirit he embraced from an early age: 'chameleon paint' on car bodywork used for tuning. 

 

The metallic pigments sprayed onto the aluminium panels create iridescent effects that reflect a myriad of fleeting, perpetually shifting colours. A nod to Malaval's capacity for metamorphosis, as he continually transgressed the orthodoxy of the art world by changing styles and mediums, this chromatic fluidity also pays homage to the Multicolor Caméléon exhibition in 1973, which marked Malaval's return to painting after several years' hiatus and unveiled his first canvas with glitters.

Presented side by side, these two glam rock ensembles hypnotise our gaze with their sparkling surfaces, unashamedly displaying a falsely frivolous design. "Glitter is the make up of painting," Malaval proclaimed, directly challenging the artificiality and facticity of his practice. Proceeding from the same critical tropism, Mosset's works presented in the exhibition offer an acerbic caricature of painting and its values, here cheerfully subverted.  

 

Like a boomerang, taking the opposite tack from the self-referential monochromes usually conceived by the artist, Olivier Mosset's shimmering surfaces introduce hic et nunc a new element: the viewer's reflection. And so the time bomb appears. By placing the public at the heart of his visual device, Mosset creates a disturbing re-enactment of Malaval's last exhibition-performance, held at the Maison des arts de Créteil in the spring of 1980. Under the scandalised gaze of a humiliating and cruel crowd, Malaval, drunk and stunned by the rock riffs, improvised forty paintings live before hanging them on the diamond-shaped walls, as if the paintings, completely greyed out, had finally capsized. A month later, he took his own life. Olivier Mosset's paintings, also hung in a diamond pattern on the gallery walls, mirror this final opus, commemorating an uncompromisingly self-taught artist who used art as a critical and cathartic outlet, sowing the seeds of freedom for a whole new generation.

 

— Roxane Ilias, October 2022

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