The Supports/Surfaces group

Summer 1969. In a challenge to the conventions of framing and picture-making as well as the dead weight of galleries and museums a group of artists from the south of France start to paint by laying down coloured pigment in a “surface” on a specific “support”, a canvas that may be framed or unframed. For several years, the group’s founders Dezeuze, Pagès, Saytour, Valensi and Viallat sought to explore one of the least exploited yet most essential aspects of painting: the materials that constitute the work. The support (frame for the canvas), which had always remained hidden, now became a subject of experiment. Pieces were created by working around the support itself. This was neither a return to the origins of painting, nor a quest for primitive purity, but simply the exposure of the elements of the picture.

The support/surfaces group began in 1969 and revolved around Cane, Dezeuze, Saytour et Viallat. It was quickly picked by the Paris museums. Their works were shown in September 1970 at the ARC in the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Later the group’s exhibitions expanded to include pieces by Pagès, Arnal, Cane, Dolla and Pincemin. The group disbanded very quickly however and, after 1972, all the artists involved were ploughing their own distinct furrows, with one-man shows in French and foreign galleries or mingled in small groups as part of collective exhibitions.

The Supports/Surfaces movement is one of the great currents that shaped the history of contemporary European painting. This explains the high number of their works to come up for auction, around a hundred each year, with a turnover of EUR 300,000 to EUR 400,000. The market is concentrated around Cane, Viallat et Pincemin. Saytour’s and Pagès’s works are still a rarity on the stands. The prices paid remain very accessible: 80% of canvases go for less than EUR 10,000. Their index received a boost from the retrospective exhibition The Supports-Surfaces years in the Centre Georges-Pompidou Collections held at Paris’s Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in 1998. But, despite gaining 110% since this show, the index is still 38% below its 1989-1990 peak.

Jean-Pierre Pincemin has been the group’s record-holder since June 1990, and a EUR 64,000 equivalent sale at Briest for a mixed-technique work from 1982. His prices slumped by nearly 75% in the early 1990s but are now starting to recover and have risen by 145% since 2001. Between 1995 and 1997 not a single Pincemin reached EUR 10,000. This year he broke EUR 10,000 fourteen times. The market is still rich in works on paper that can be snapped up for less than EUR 1,000. A small oil pastel from 1975 sold for EUR 650 in October 2005 at Walper (Paris).
Works by Viallat, the second highest priced artist in the group, are still trading well below their 1990 levels, although they were getting back close to EUR 20,000 in 2006. On October 28 a large canvas from 1980 went for EUR 19,000 at Artcurial. Only big pieces from before the mid-eighties have any chance of reaching this sort of price. More recent prints on fabric often go for less than EUR 7,000-8,000. For instance, at Cornette de Saint-Cyr on October 23, a 1989 work nearly 1.8 metres wide went for EUR 4,200.
As for Louis Cane, it is the work he did after the Supports/Surfaces years that is the most valued. His record price was set in July 2004, at Sotheby’s for Trois femmes sur une balançoire, an imposing 1988 sculpture from the Nahon collection. His record for a support work dates from 1990 with Peinture mur sol (1974), sold for the equivalent of EUR 28,000 at Labat-Thierry. These extremely rare old works are even often bought in at reserve prices that look very cheap, such as a watercolour on paper from 1974 offered for EUR 500-600 at Artcurial last December or a pencil drawing on canvas offered for EUR 800 at Mathias-Millon-Robert in November 2005.

Enthusiasts of the Supports/Surfaces group can find a host of their works in galleries. Daniel Templon (Paris), Oniris (Rennes) and Ceysson (Saint-Etienne) follow Claude Viallat’s work. In the group’s southern French heartland the Vasistas gallery (Montpellier) has organised exhibitions around recent works by Dezeuze and Saytour.