Acrylic on canvas

81.5 × 100 cm. 32 1/8 × 39 3/8 in.

Signed in English on bottom left; titled in French on the stretcher
EXHIBITED
26 Oct 1993, Mathieu, Galerie Protée, Paris, No.4

PROVENANCE
Received as a gift by original European collector from the artist
Private Collection, Paris

When a Thunderbolt Penetrates the Chaos
The Peak of Georges Mathieu's Abstract Lyricism

Georges Mathieu, the transatlantic painter I admire most
—— Clement Greenberg

In the post-war Western art world Georges Mathieu (1921-2012) was an outstanding talent and his unique lyrical abstractionist style was the first time a Western artist ever incorporated Eastern calligraphy into abstract painting. Moreover, this also introduced surrealist-like imaginative space and action painting awareness to Western abstraction. As a result, when such giants of Chinese abstract painting as Zao Wou-ki and Chu Teh-chun traveled to France they indirectly benefited from the reflected brilliance of Mathieu. Indeed, even the Gutai Group in Japan was deeply inspired by the artist's work, a reflection of Mathieu's international reputation in the 1950s and later position in art history. In his lifetime, Georges Mathieu held more than 200 solo exhibitions and four major retrospectives, with his paintings collected by almost 100 international art museums.

Wild Colors and Lines, Glittering Space
In 1989, Mathieu entered what has since become known as his “wild” mature period. In this period, Mathieu adopted the innovation of directly squeezing the pigments onto his works through a rubber hose. This created an awe-inspiring tenseness of flow, splash colors and colored blocks, with the canvas akin to a battlefield wherein the artist was the very model of an indomitable king.

Supplices Illuminés was completed during the peak of Mathieu's creativity in 1991 and contains the classical color and line features of the artist's wild period: the intense collision of red, yellow, blue and ink colors, radiating outwards in all directions from the center of the painting like an army of thousands galloping across a battlefield. The dimensions of this canvas are also an example of his preferred “golden ratio” in this period, in as much as large flat strokes were already unable to meet the needs of Mathieu's inner passion. For this work, he wore gloves covered in pigment, repeatedly making circles and adding colors to the canvas, as a richly-layered vermilion background came into being. Later, Mathieu applied thick and flat blue-black obliquely-oriented lines, and then squeezed yellow and red pigments onto the canvas through a handheld rubber hose. This created robust and vigorous three dimensional lines, with the oil colors in the tightly-knit composition radiating color and light. Together with the calmness of the background hue, this establishes a duality of language built on clarity and obscurity, tranquility and dynamism, chaos and stability.

The Wonderful Outcome of Combing East and West, Juxtaposing Time and Space
Throughout the creative process Mathieu concentrated on elevating “painting speed,” fully focused and brimming with emotion, almost like the “painting with flying strokes” approach of Eastern calligraphy. The first French Minister of Culture André Malraux once said of Mathieu: “Finally, a calligrapher has appeared in the West.” In point of fact, Mathieu started researching calligraphy, Zen Buddhism and Daoist philosophy in the 1950s and included these in his abstract paintings, which expanded the content of Western art. After 40 years of such practice Supplices Illuminés contains black strokes that cut across the work and are reminiscent of Eastern wild cursive brushwork. In addition, the fine bright sparkling yellow lines wantonly overlap as they explode from the middle of the painting, while the splashed red, blue and ink colors are suspended in midair and radiate vigorously, overflowing with the life energy of a dazzling blazing sun.

Mathieu painted Supplices Illuminés when he was 70-years-old, a time at which his art had reached a different level of completeness and maturity, where the artist could “do whatever his heart desired without overstepping any bounds,” though his rigorous approach still remained replete with charisma.

Price estimate:
HKD: 750,000 – 1,200,000
USD: 96,700 – 154,700

Auction Result:
HKD: 2,124,000