Martial Raysse

The Martial Raysse exhibition at Palazzo Grassi displays a potpourri of 350 works that open like scissors around two dates: 1958 and 2015, the start and end of a career spanning almost 6 decades.

“Penelope coming into contact with Ulysses / He strips off her tunic ceremoniously / Underneath / She is wearing an / [Olympic] swimsuit” (Martial Raysse, J’ai mille choses à classer…., in Collage, September 1966). What could be more alluring and desirable than a beach of fine golden sand frequented only by worldly females in bikinis – giggling and posing invitingly? Add the music from a vintage juke-box and the rapture is total. Exhibited for the first time in 1962 in the memorable “Dylaby” exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and now at the centre of a Martial Raysse retrospective hosted by the Fondazione Pinault in Palazzo Grassi, Raysse Beach is the work that best epitomises the French artist’s singular poetic, a spectacular mix of sophistication, kitsch, exoticism, stereotype, poetry and striptease.

Its amenability – nothing is more conciliating than the faintly cadenced undulation evoked by a marina or the face of a mademoiselle with a subtropical tan – and its simultaneous artificiality (inflatable dolphins and ducks, beached and doing their own thing, thick fuchsia tresses, plastic plants and petals) give this emblematic installation the unusual essence of objects both undressed and dressed up that informs all Martial Raysse’s art. Both the nudity (the naked body but also the consumer object stripped and “sanitised” by its contingency) and the mask (in the broadest sense of camouflage, fashion, make-up) are constant presences in the artist’s work, whether serving the cause of satire or that of burlesque.

Martial Raysse was born in 1936 in Golfe-Juan Vallauris, a seaside resort on the most picturesque shores of the French Riviera. Its amber-coloured beaches lined with lush palm trees and bare-breasted women have always featured in the artist’s most successful works. The son of ceramists, the young Raysse lacked neither inventive nor a poetic vein. In 1954, he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Nice, the city of the Carnival, the fitting burial place of Matisse and the luminous birthplace of Yves Klein and Arman (like Raysse also prominent exponents of France’s Nouveau Réalisme) but he soon opted to become a painter rather than a writer, in order to attain that ultimate meaning which, as he said, words fail to achieve. It was but a short step from the painted formulae of abstract art to the plastic forms of assemblages and Raysse began sifting the beaches along the Nice coast in search of detritus, which he then melted down in his home fireplace to create Calder-like spatial sculptures shaped like the wind, sea and clouds.

In 1959, sudden inspiration came by way of the Prisunic store: the prosaic nature of facial soaps, detersives and margarine (emblems of a lightweight consumer society) inspired his first assemblage Hygiène de la Vision and he has said that he wanted his works to have the obviousness of a mass-produced refrigerator, new, aseptic and unalterable. The following year he was one of nine signatories of the Nouveau Réalisme movement, although his heart was not in it and he soon distanced himself to explore new horizons. That was the time when art was not being created but found. The artist exalted the virtues and temperaments of everyday objects whatever they were – cosmetics, medicines, toys, mannequins – attaching images and symbols to them within indecipherable cosmogonies.

Steeped in harsh acidulous colours and transferred from picture to picture, the face of his first wife France (and later of Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve and Sophia Loren) became the scathing image of an imposition captured at rest – a woman reduced to naked stereotype by mass media, to which Raysse started paying increasing attention. This was followed in the strongest of all his appropriations by the use of neon – the perfect fusion in the artist’s eyes of the ciphers of art and those of modernity – and, starting with the phosphorescent and narcotised odalisques of Made in Japan, the ruthless détournement of classical masterpieces. “I like him”, Marcel Duchamp confided to Pierre Cabanne in 1967. “It’s really hard to understand why the things he does are rather irritating, because of that disagreeable neon light. But he will renew himself or at least change gradually, although the underlying idea will always remain the same.”

The following years confirmed Duchamp’s prediction. In the decades between his permanent break with the official art world in 1970 and the 2011 auction that consecrated him as “the most expensive living French artist in the world”, Raysse was less interested in consolidating his success and more in the short-lived pleasure of experimentation, which advanced alone and upright in his work without ever spreading towards the realisation of a manner. This is proven by the exhibition at Palazzo Grassi, which displays a sundry potpourri of 350 works that open like scissors around two dates: 1958 and 2015, the start and end of a career spanning almost three decades. Interchangeability allows for the mixing up of pieces and periods, in an exhibition approach with a disrupted timeframe that moves forwards and backwards as if in a game of snakes and ladders.

A mute expanse of small items of all ages (sculptures? fetishes? talismans?) floods the entrance like flotsam deposited at high tide (inebriating on first glance); on the upper floors are the most recent paintings and the sculptures in bronze/cast stone inspired by classical statues, alongside the famous assemblages and parodying experimental films 50 years old. There are also drawings, sketches and collages. At times, it is like discovering an echo or a constant. You decipher the relationships and complicated understandings with a feeling that everything is linked and a response.

Brown eyes sparkling with mischievousness, pink cheeks and even pinker lips. Reclining on a scallop shell or garishly made up, woman is present in all her facets (arrogant vamp, bashful teenager, uninhibited nymph, woman-child, woman-goddess, woman-cat), confirming the female and Junoesque essence of the artist’s work. The exhibition curator Caroline Bourgeoise says, “Raysse is fascinated by the Other and the Unknown”, and it is indeed the unknowable face-totem of the “free forms” of the 1960s (elementary silhouettes in cardboard, silver foil, leopard-print fabric, papier mâché and hen’s feathers) that, shunning all physiognomy or semblance, set Raysse immediately on the path of the icon and so of the enigma, differentiating his sublimated women from the woman-idol, all skin, of the American Pop Art to which most would subscribe him.

Over the last 20 years, Raysse applied himself with special frenzy to painting and it is this that the exhibition organisers wanted to highlight the most, as clearly conveyed by the image chosen for the poster (the woman’s face as pale as the moon in Radieuse des Nuages, 2012) as well as by the large number of paintings on show. These include the enormous Ici Plage, comme ici-bas (2012), a work that certainly does not represent the Riviera artist’s last beach but it does aspire, 50 years after Raysse Beach, to becoming his manifesto or final testament, containing as it does a vibrant spectacle that is typical of Raysse and in the register of the great narration.

Lined up along a filthy waterline are young dandies, girls in miniskirts, ascetics, great talkers, young brats, clowns and virgins of all colours (livid, jaundiced, purple) all striking a pose, some standoffish and arrogant, others with affected bashfulness and nonchalance. Each one expresses a gesture, an invitation or maybe a wink. In the background is an imaginary coastal town; we see the ubiquitous palm trees in the distance, a funfair, a fight and a camel. Lingering in the sky are the dark clouds of a thunderstorm. Everything and everyone is touched by a host of symbols and ciphered signs (five-pointed star, egg, French flag, crocodile, cat) but there is no point seeking a manifest meaning. “Painting”, the artist merely comments, “must make the world intelligible. It cannot be reduced to a reciprocal play of forms.” It is still the arcane, one might say, that dominates the latest Raysse vision but also farce and mise-en-scène. So it does not seem absurd to imagine that a suntanned Penelope might just step our from amongst the bathers in Ici Plage, searching for her Ulysses, with a warm face and her body squeezed into the latest swimsuit, Olympi(on)c, of course.

until 30 November 2015
Martial Raysse
Palazzo Grassi
Campo San Samuele, Venice

Martial Raysse

The Martial Raysse exhibition at Palazzo Grassi displays a potpourri of 350 works that open like scissors around two dates: 1958 and 2015, the start and end of a career spanning almost 6 decades.

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