PARIS.- In François Morellet’s work, geometry is never cold: it vibrates, tightens, malfunctions. Beneath the neutrality of the system, a licentious humour disturbs the lines and forms as the paintings mirror the positions of the Kama Sutra. With Geometry in spasms / Pornometry, the artist introduces eroticism into the rigour of the concrete and makes an inventory of the sexual positions with the use of simple shapes: rectangles and squares. He perverts the austere vocabulary of systematic abstraction by breathing into it a deliberately irreverent dimension. Behind the large white monochromes, “the geometric figures are disfigured by anthropomorphic figuration with pornographic leaning” as Morellet wrote at the time.

Playing with the fundamental elements of the vocabulary of abstraction, his compositions become the protagonists of an ambiguous choreography. The geometry seems to suddenly vibrate with a physical tension: the forms come together, couple and overlap, In the missionary position, In 69, From behind or Doggy style, evoking less mathematical position than the movement of desire. The grid, for a long time the symbol of order and rationality in modern abstraction, metamorphoses here into a discreet theatre of carnal energy, as the artist uses elements of his own anatomy to fashion lines and squares. Those Figures hâtives borrow with humour from Yves Klein’s anthropometries, distorting this time “the figurative impressions” with “the geometrical figures they create”.

Presented for the first time at the Consortium in Dijon in 1986, then at Gallery Facchetti in New York the following year, the series of monumental works, which gives its title to the exhibition, took place at a key moment in his career: that of his recognition by the institutions, marked with a retrospective at Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou. In response to this recognition, Morellet provokes—to remind the public that he remains “the grotesque son of Mondrian and Picabia”, the latter finding his models in the erotic and pornographic magazines of the 1930s. After lyrical, geometrical, concrete, optical and kinetic abstraction, Morellet invented the abstraction classified X.

— Christian Alandete, curator of the exhibition

FRANÇOIS MORELLET (1926 – 2016), a prolific, self-taught artist, developed a radical approach to geometric abstraction in his paintings, sculptures and installations over a career spanning more than six decades. Working primarily with basic geometric forms and using multiple materials in his works (steel, neon tubes, adhesive tape, wire mesh, wood…), Morellet committed himself to a methodology of rigorous objectivity and personal detachment.

His work aims to control the creative process and to demystify the romantic mythology of art and the “inspired” artist. To accomplish this, Morellet dictated that each of his choices would need to be justified by a pre-established principle—at times even involving chance in certain components of the work. Other consistent aspects in the works are his playfulness and sense of humour, as seen in their titles, which often contain puns, parodies or portemanteau words.

Born in Cholet, France, where he lived and worked all his life, Morellet studied Russian at the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris before returning to run the family toy factory until 1975. This work enabled him to gain financial independence as he was simultaneously familiarising himself with the tools and production techniques that would come to influence his practice.

Concluding a brief figurative period in the 1940s, Morellet turned to abstraction following a highly influential trip to Brazil in 1950. There he discovered concrete art and the work of Max Bill. Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg also became decisive influences, as did the geometric patterns, anonymous aesthetics and the precision of Islamic decorative art that he encountered during his visit to the Alhambra in Spain in 1952.

In the late 1950s, he discovered Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s “Duo-collages” through his friend Ellsworth Kelly. These works prompted him to introduce chance as a central principle in his art, for example creating works based on random numbers found in his local telephone book or on the infinite series of decimals of the number pi.

Up until 1960, Morellet was establishing the various systems he used to arrange forms (superimposition, fragmentation, juxtaposition, interference), notably creating his first “trame,” a network of parallel black lines superimposed in a specific order.
In early 1960s France, Morellet was one of the six founding members of the experimental artists collective Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV), which also included Francisco Sobrino, Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, Yvaral and Joël Stein. He also participated in the international Nouvelle Tendance movement, which sought to collectively create and develop experimental art based on scientific knowledge of visual perception.

1970 began a period marked by the creation of increasingly stripped-down works that played with their support and the space surrounding them. He also produced a large number of architectural integrations, beginning with his first monumental intervention on the Plateau de la Reynie in Paris (1971), at the site of the present-day Centre Pompidou.

Morellet’s work has been included in a number of major international group exhibitions, including Documenta in Kassel, Germany [1964 (with GRAV), 1968 and 1977] and the Venice Biennale (1970 and 1990). In 1971, his first solo museum show was organised by the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, which subsequently travelled throughout Europe. Other major retrospectives of Morellet’s work have been organised at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin (1977), the Centre Pompidou (1986 and 2011) and the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume (2000) in Paris. He was also the subject of a North American retrospective in 1984-85, which travelled to Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain, the Brooklyn Museum and Miami’s Center for the Fine Arts. In 2010, Morellet became the second artist to have a work inaugurated during his lifetime at the Musée du Louvre, the permanent in situ installation L’esprit d’escalier.

His work is represented in major public collections, including the Centre Pompidou, Dia Art Foundation (New York), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Seoul Museum of Art, Tate Britain, Tel Aviv Museum, Kunsthaus /urich and Nationalgalerie Berlin.