Claude Viallat, Dimmer 145

1990, oil on canvas,  150cm

Born in 1936 (Nimes, France). Graduated Beaux-Arts de Montpellier. A charter member of Support-Surface.

``Support-Surface" alludes to frame and canvas. Its practitioners remove the frame from a painting, abandoning the fixed formula that painting equals canvas plus frame. They support the unframed canvas with poles or spread it on a table. Or, folding it like cloth, they make it hard to see if it is a painting or some fabric with patterns. Dimmer 145 has repetitive patterns on a fabric instead of canvas material, revealing Viallat's traits, "breaking, superposing, and piling."

Viallat once said that everything in contemporary art is already in the Lascaux Cave and other prehistoric paintings. Contemporaries have created nothing, merely inventing techniques. His remarks make us look back again to see if art has lost its true meaning.