For the first time in Angers, the musée des Beaux-Arts will host over one hundred works by Robert Malaval. This exceptional retrospective presents works – paintings, drawings, sculptures – from private collections, from French museums - the centre Georges Pompidou, the museums of Nice, Dunkirk and Chartres. The galleries or former galleries Robert Malaval collaborated with are equally well represented, in particular those of Alphonse Chave, Yvon Lambert, Daniel Gervis, Pierre Nahon or Baudoin Lebon.
Bas-reliefs, paintings and sequins
The exhibition traces his itinerary in six chronological sequences. The first room presents Les Aliments blancs (1961-1964) (White food), made of papier-mâché, protuberances, bas-reliefs and interventions on objects and furniture, then another area is dedicated to the Rose-Blanc-Mauve period(1965-1969), works that are increasingly pictorial with the use of acrylic paint applied with an airbrush. The itinerary continues with fresh and happy works from the Eté pourri-peinture fraîche periods (Rotten Summer-fresh paint) (summer 1972) and Multicolor, followed by the Poussières d’étoiles (1974) series (Stardust), which is the beginning of his very free use of sequins. The last two rooms present works from the series Kamikaze, Pastel Vortex and those done in Créteil.
Illustration: Little Queenie givré vert et rouge, 1980
Acrylic and sequins on canvas. 120 x 120 cm.
Angers, private collection.
Photo P. Joly © Adagp Paris 2009
The taste for ruptures
Robert Malaval was born in July 1937 in Nice and died suddenly in Paris in August 1980. A self-taught man, he discovered painting towards the age of 16 and developed a passion for this mode of expression. He signed his first contract with the Alphonse Chave gallery where he created his first Aliment blanc. But Malaval’s work is made of ruptures. Guided by his refusal to repeat and his questioning of the isolation between the arts, he expresses himself as well through painting as through drawing, writing or music. The use of sequins as of 1973, placed with large gestures over the canvas, appearing and disappearing according to the spectator’s games of lights and movement, illustrates his quest for change, instability and uncertainty.
Suppress borders
Malaval is one of the sole artists to have totally integrated rock culture into his art. It is precisely in the confrontation between music and art that the breaking of compartments is most successful. In the middle of the 1960s, in particular with his Pastels Vortex, rock music becomes the real motor of his artistic practice. He paints like the musician writes his partition. «I felt like painting works that would be as quick, as instant as music (...). I put myself to paint as one writes songs, I play a drawing, I sing it». Malaval wishes to paint as one gets up on stage, Consequently, in the context of his exhibition Attention à la peinture (Beware of paint) at the “maison de la culture” in Créteil in 1980, he created an event by painting in public. By suppressing the border between the workshop and the exhibition area, he once again questions the conditions of presenting painting and the image of the artist. He committed suicide on 8 or 9 August of the same year.
Illustration: Poussières d’étoiles, 1973. Acrylic and sequins on canvas. 130 x 195 cm. Paris, courtesy galerie Daniel Gervis.
Photo P. David, © Adagp Paris 2009
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