Raysse
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Martial Raysse was born in France in 1936, and was still a child when the Second World War broke out. By the time he was a teenager, Europe was just recovering from the horrors of war. As a boy in the 1960s, he would go to the cinema to see Marilyn Monroe, listen to rock ‘n roll and saw the first colour television adverts. Growing up in the south of France, he often visited Nice and enjoyed the beaches of the French Riviera along with his fellow-artists, and danced in fashionable clubs, with their neon signs and strobing lights. But his life wasn’t all about social fun; he also liked to study. From a young age, he has written poetry, and at 20 enrolled to study literature at Nice University. He was fascinated by History of Art, especially French and Italian art; his favourite artists were Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci and Pollaiuolo. At a certain point, he decided to abandon his studies and dedicate himself entirely to art. He began by making abstract drawings but immediately understood that his interests lay elsewhere. He was fascinated by a new material, almost unknown at the time: plastic. He scoured shops and supermarkets looking for popular and colourful objects, which he used in canvases, sculptures, installations, assemblages and three-dimensional paintings. He copied masterpieces by artists from earlier periods and movements, but replaced their delicate colours with bright, contrasting tones. For example, he transformed Ingres’s Odalisque into a contemporary seductive woman, and presented Brigitte Bardot as a sacred figure to be venerated. He created pretend beaches with inflatable beds and a jukebox; he directed psychedelic films populated by strange people; he gathered objects found in the street or on the beach and added different coloured neons to canvases. In America, he discovered Pop Art and got to know the Beat generation. He tried hallucinogenic drugs, which wass made clear in his works at this period, as he closed mushrooms and psychedelic worlds into wooden boxes. He basically had fun with his art, filling his works with the characteristic themes and objects of those years. But by the 1980s, Martial had grown up and become tired of pop culture and its superficiality, and began dedicating himself to ‘traditional’ art, made of bronze, tempera paint and large canvases. The colours are always dark and the compositions are based on sacred scenes, such as the Last Supper or mythological subjects (the story of Bacchus, god of wine), and are always reinterpreted with irony and lightness. If at first, he painted film stars and magazine celebrities, in these later years, he has painted ordinary people, friends and people he knows. And when he doesn’t have a model, he strikes a pose and paints himself. Martial’s life has changed; he has become more introspective and profound, living in the French countryside, and often alone. For him, all that matters now is painting.
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Martial Raysse was born in France in 1936, and was still a child when the Second World War broke out. By the time he was a teenager, Europe was just recovering from the horrors of war. As a boy in the 1960s, he would go to the cinema to see Marilyn Monroe, listen to rock ‘n roll and saw the first colour television adverts. Growing up in the south of France, he often visited Nice and enjoyed the beaches of the French Riviera along with his fellow-artists, and danced in fashionable clubs, with their neon signs and strobing lights. But his life wasn’t all about social fun; he also liked to study. From a young age, he has written poetry, and at 20 enrolled to study literature at Nice University. He was fascinated by History of Art, especially French and Italian art; his favourite artists were Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci and Pollaiuolo. At a certain point, he decided to abandon his studies and dedicate himself entirely to art. He began by making abstract drawings but immediately understood that his interests lay elsewhere. He was fascinated by a new material, almost unknown at the time: plastic. He scoured shops and supermarkets looking for popular and colourful objects, which he used in canvases, sculptures, installations, assemblages and three-dimensional paintings. He copied masterpieces by artists from earlier periods and movements, but replaced their delicate colours with bright, contrasting tones. For example, he transformed Ingres’s Odalisque into a contemporary seductive woman, and presented Brigitte Bardot as a sacred figure to be venerated. He created pretend beaches with inflatable beds and a jukebox; he directed psychedelic films populated by strange people; he gathered objects found in the street or on the beach and added different coloured neons to canvases. In America, he discovered Pop Art and got to know the Beat generation. He tried hallucinogenic drugs, which wass made clear in his works at this period, as he closed mushrooms and psychedelic worlds into wooden boxes. He basically had fun with his art, filling his works with the characteristic themes and objects of those years. But by the 1980s, Martial had grown up and become tired of pop culture and its superficiality, and began dedicating himself to ‘traditional’ art, made of bronze, tempera paint and large canvases. The colours are always dark and the compositions are based on sacred scenes, such as the Last Supper or mythological subjects (the story of Bacchus, god of wine), and are always reinterpreted with irony and lightness. If at first, he painted film stars and magazine celebrities, in these later years, he has painted ordinary people, friends and people he knows. And when he doesn’t have a model, he strikes a pose and paints himself. Martial’s life has changed; he has become more introspective and profound, living in the French countryside, and often alone. For him, all that matters now is painting.
