Curator and writer Molly Warnock reflects on Simon Hantai’s practice with an incisive new essay that emphasizes the ways in which this extraordinary body of work presented in Unfolding continues to reveal itself anew.

Asked in 2020 about his encounters with the work of Simon Hantaï, the painter David Reed affirmed his interest in the folded and unfolded canvases the Hungarian-born artist produced over a period of more than twenty years, from 1960 until 1982. Yet he equally underscored the longtime invisibility of Hantaï’s abstraction and that of other painters active primarily in France within a New York artworld confident of its international preeminence and largely contemptuous of developments abroad. Situating himself within a diverse transatlantic generation that would include Noël Dolla, Bernard Frize, Jean-Michel Meurice, and Claude Viallat, among other French painters who were born in the late ’30s and ’40s (and came of age artistically in the late ’60s and ’70s), Reed reflected:

I had a lot in common with the French painters of my age, as did other painters in New York of my generation. We were all grappling with abstract expressionism’s legacy and wondering how to take painting someplace new. How to get beyond Pollock?—the same question that Hantaï asked. We were all living through a period in which it was thought that experimental painting was over, that further innovation was foreclosed. I feel that, by not knowing one another's work, painters of my generation and the French generation lost an historical opportunity. There was a chance to learn from each other and share possibilities but this did not happen enough, partly because it was hard to get information and communicate.[1]

Reed’s comments helpfully situate Hantaï in a relationship of intimate proximity to post-abstract expressionist painting in the United States, even as they acknowledge the distinctness of the perspectives he helped to open. This exhibition wagers that Hantaï’s expansive oeuvre, which is at long last unfolding into view on these shores, still offers vital resources for artistic practice and theory alike. Especially compelling, perhaps, are the ways in which his work challenges us to reconsider questions of medium and method in late modern and contemporary painting.

Beginning in 1967, with the catalogue for an important exhibition of his work since 1960 at the Galerie Jean Fournier, in Paris, Hantaï routinely presented pliage as a “method” (méthode) and stressed the continued enchainment of distinct painting groups, each defined by a particular modification of the folding technique, beneath that more general aegis.[2] His way of speaking about pliage as a self-renewing enterprise conjures thoughts often carried in the US by the notion of medium, a term with no exact equivalent in the French context. Yet Hantaï places no particular emphasis on flatness as an end, as in Clement Greenberg’s broadly influential (and chronologically overlapping) formulations on modernist painting. Rather, he underscores the procedure as such—an accent attuned to his longstanding belief that an adequate response to Pollock’s dripped and poured canvases of the later ’40s and early ’50s had necessarily to involve an analogous transformation of technique.

In this, Hantaï is arguably closer to the philosopher Stanley Cavell, for whom modernism names a situation in which “an art has lost its natural relation to its history”: that is, one in which the established conventions of a medium no longer facilitate communication or seem actively to block it.[3] The task of the modernist artist is therefore to find new means of practicing that art, to discover or invent procedures capable of bearing the weight and force of its tradition—“unheard-of structures that define themselves and their history against one another.”[4] Profoundly anti-essentialist, this account proposes that a medium has continually to be re-imagined out of itself. Closely related intuitions run through Hantaï’s work and writing.

Yet we do well to hold on to the painter’s preferred term. “Method” serves equally to capture Hantaï’s conviction that the problems of painting are never simply formal, opening instead onto much larger questions about how we stand toward one another and the unpainted world all around us. Informed by a long tradition of spiritual exercise stretching back to Saint Ignatius in the sixteenth century (what is often referred to as the “Ignatian method” in subsequent exegeses), Hantaï’s mature conception of painting as a notionally interminable practice upon the self also reflects his deep engagement with a host of additional sources germane to the post-WWII French context, from Georges Bataille’s writings on inner experience in the early ’40s and Henri Michaux’s experiments with mescaline in the late ’50s and ’60s to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis throughout the long twentieth century, among other crucial points of reference. Centrally at stake in his mature thinking about pliage is the idea that folding entails a certain neutrality: “The problem was: How to overcome the aesthetic privilege of talent, art, etc....? How to banalize the exceptional? How to become exceptionally banal.”[5]

This commitment follows upon and transforms the premises underwriting Hantaï’s gestural paintings of the late ’50s, represented in this show by Sans titre (Untitled), 1958. Speaking to Georges Charbonnier on French radio in 1957, Hantaï emphasized the importance of working as rapidly as possible in a trance-like mode—an appeal to extreme psychological states deeply rooted in the Surrealist practice of automatic writing and more recently attributed programmatic force in the writings and public painting performances of Hantaï’s exact generational peer, the French lyrical abstractionist Georges Mathieu. Citing Maurice Blanchot’s definition of poetic creation as the “realization of the work and the man at the same time,” Hantaï declared the goal to be “a total fusion [with the work] in the moment of creation.”[6] He conceded there were obstacles to the complete accomplishment of this aim, both “biologically speaking” and insofar as paintings inevitably “are bound to materials and external conditions: paint, canvas, etc.” However: “The ideal would be to eliminate as much as possible.”

Sans titre demonstrates that attempt to eliminate exteriority. As in other works of this moment, Hantaï covered a mid-format canvas with a thin coat of oil paint in a single color: black, a metaphorically freighted choice identified in another exactly contemporaneous public statement with the “pure potentiality of indistinctness” and the “unmanifested.”[7] The defining gestures are spare and literally subtractive. Slightly to right of center, Hantaï deployed a stiff dry brush to sweep away still-humid paint with blunt horizontal strokes before using another implement—most likely, the metal ring of a disused alarm clock—to swiftly carve out a roughly ovoid trace. The scraping allows the white ground of the painting to shine through the darkness. Yet the result of that action, originally proposed as an ex-nihilo emanation, is likely to strike us today as rhetorically laden—an all-too-legible emblem of the “total void” beloved of lyrical abstraction.[8] The quest for pure interiority does not give Hantaï a way to go on.

By contrast, folding turns entirely upon the limits imposed by the ordinary workings of paint and canvas.[9] To be sure, Hantaï’s comments on pliage often stressed a condition of quasi-corporeal merger with the unstretched cloth support in the act of painting, as when he reflected, from the vantage of 1973, on his systematic appropriation of folding thirteen years prior: “All one had to do was put oneself in the position of those who have not yet seen anything; put oneself in the canvas. You could fill up the canvas without knowing where the edge was. You could go even further and paint with your eyes closed.”[10] Yet the temporal accent—those who have not yet seen anything—is to the point. The procedurally blind labor upon the canvas is promised from the first to the work’s future unfolding, its revelation as a separate entity over and beyond its maker.[11]

Looking at a pliage painting in this show such as Bourgeons, 1972, completed around the time Hantaï offered the above description, it is easy to imagine the scene of its making: the larger-than-life-size format laid out horizontally on the studio floor; the painter within it, on all fours, lifting and tying off bud-shaped pouches of the unstretched support until the entire canvas is an amorphous relief of eccentric protrusions. Those growths are then brushed, one by one, with medium blue paint. He need not work quickly, having long ago abandoned the aesthetic of speed in favor of precisely such repetitive, humdrum processes.[12] Dried, unfolded, and pulled taut, however, the completed painting confronts us—as it confronted him—with an afocal array of cleft and shattered forms, the painted zones having been wholly rearticulated by the sudden, surprising emergence of unpainted canvas. Rather than appearing as a problem to be overcome, exteriority now enables the continued unfolding of Hantaï’s practice.

The preponderance of paintings in this exhibition attest to the diversity of effects enabled by these deliberately simple procedures, both within series and across them. Especially noteworthy is Hantaï’s continued interrogation of gesture, as manifest in his gradual passage from aleatory crumpling (as with the two Mariales on view, from 1960 and 1962, and with Catamuron, 1963) or knotting (as with Meun, 1968) to the systematic pleating of canvases into allover grid-like structures (as with the four Tabulas, ranging from 1974 to 1981). Additional experimental parameters include size and scale, which assume particular importance among the long-running Tabulas, and—most strikingly perhaps after Sans titre, 1958—color, a feature that comes to matter to Hantaï precisely on account of the contingency and ephemerality of its perceptual effects. Collectively, these paintings bear witness to pliage as a relentlessly self-critical procedure, stripped of any final telos.