François Morellet - Géométrie dans les spasmes

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