Gaston Chaissac

Gaston Chaissac Untitled 1955 Oil on wood and metal (probably lid of a metal wash kettle) Approx. 109 x 43 cm. Signed (incised) 'CHAISSAC'. Inscribed on the reverse of the wood. - With slight signs of age. Provenance Gallery Nathan, Zurich (with sticker on the reverse); Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia. Exhibitions Paris 2000 (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume), Gaston Chaissac, ext.cat., p.276 with color illus. Linz 1996 (Neue Galerie der Stadt), Tübingen (Kunsthalle), Wuppertal 1996/1997 (Von-der-Heydt-Museum), Frankfurt/M. 1997 (Schirn Kunsthalle), Gaston Chaissac 1910-1964, Ausst.Kat.Nr.77, p.126 with color ill. Zurich 1987/1988 (Galerie Nathan), Chaissac 1910-1964, Ausst.Kat.Nr.36, o.p. with ill. The central artistic concern of the French painter and sculptor Gaston Chaissac was the examination of the human face. Although he also experimented with abstract forms of expression in the course of his work, he remained committed to a representational-figurative mode of depiction. His imaginative creatures, however, are far from a true-to-life rendering. In almost all of his works - including works on paper, wood, and metal - a pair of eyes is hidden somewhere, either shyly and curiously or horror-strickenly seeking contact with the viewer. Related to the works of fellow artist Jean Dubuffet, Chaissac's figures have the characteristic that they cannot be assigned to any gender - in their appearance they oscillate between human and animal with faces between mask and grimace. Beginning in 1949, Chaissac also transferred these principles to found materials, such as wood, bricks, wicker baskets, and metal plates, which he painted in his characteristically contoured formal language, thus giving them a completely new purpose. The series of painted objects also includes the "Figure" from 1955, which is being called up, in which Chaissac screwed painted metal objects onto a wooden slat for both the head and the torso. As stated in the catalog of Chaissac's major exhibition in 1996, he shared a preference for extra-artistic materials with Dubuffet and the artists of Arte Povera (Ausst. Kat. Linz, Tübingen, Wuppertal, Frankfurt 1996/1997, p.117). Chaissac, however, did not take a provocatively sociocritical stance, but used it to come to terms with his own identity. With his experiences of a life on the fringes of society, he developed a sharpened sense for all other forms of existence on the periphery, and often one believes to find the artist himself in these faces.