Supports/Surfaces: Painting Above All

The Origins of the Group Supports-Surfaces was a French art movement rooted in friendship clusters, which preceded the actual foundation of the group in 1970. Most of the artists had met in various art schools: André-Pierre Arnal (b. 1939), Vincent Bioulès (b. 1938), Pierre Buraglio (b. 1939), and Claude Viallat (b. 1936) knew each other from the School of Fine Arts in Montpellier. Then Buraglio and Viallat met Daniel Dezeuze (b. 1942) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Another Supports/Surfaces cluster was the School of Decorative Arts in Nice where Viallat started teaching in 1966, connecting with Noël Dolla (b. 1945) and André Valensi (1947-1999). At the time, other founding members of the group—Patrick Saytour (b. 1935), Louis Cane (b. 1943), Bernard Pagès (b. 1940) and Toni Grand (1935-2005)—were living and working in the region of Nice. All of the Supports/Surfaces folks, besides Jean-Pierre Pincemin (1944-2005), were professional artists, trained in prestigious French art schools. According to Claude Viallat the name was invented by Bioulès in August 1970, in preparation for a group exhibition featuring some of these artists at the A.R.C (Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris). The show, which took place in the early Fall, was not meant to launch a new movement. On this occasion, like in the years to come, the distinctive voices of the creators forcefully resonated. For the A.R.C show, Louis Cane, Marc Devade (1943-1983) and Daniel Dezeuze, designed and distributed a flyer negating the existence of a homogeneous group. In itself, the indeterminacy of the group’s name announced what some critics have called the…