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Open: Mon-Sat 10.30am-7.30pm

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Valerio Adami, Evelyne Axell, Matthew Brannon, Alain Bublex, Robert Cottingham, Antoine de Margerie, Gilles Elie, Bertrand Lavier, Emanuel Proweller, Peter Stämpfli, Emilio Tadini, Hervé Télémaque, William Wegman

‘Aplatitudes’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘attitudes’ and ‘aplat’: French for the painterly use of solid-color flat swatches, devoid of tone variations or shading. Galerie GP & N Vallois will explore the concept of ‘aplat’ in painting through the many and brilliant attitudes adopted by contemporary artists and artists from the 1950s-1960s.

As Richard Leydier wrote in Art Press in 2021 about Emanuel Proweller, “in the 20th century, a new way of painting appeared, using solid-color flat shapes. It led to a different way of rendering volumes, through the juxtaposition of tones and shading. This way of painting, although it already existed in the 1930s, was really developed in the post-war period and during the Pop Art era, particularly with the growing use of acrylic paint and spray cans.”

In painting, an ‘aplat’ is a uniform color surface, varying neither in brightness nor in purity. Painters also speak of flat tones or hues, as opposed to shading and modeling.
Of course, we are not bound by this strict definition, and rules are made to be broken.

Thus, exhibited alongside Proweller, Stämpfli, or Adami are also artists whose technique toys with the idea of the solid ‘aplat’ while twisting its rules, such as Alain Bublex, who paints only using a graphic palette, or William Wegman, who superimposes vintage postcards onto his color swatches, evoking the graphic design of 1950s wallpapers. Bertrand Lavier is the troublemaker here – solid, flat color shapes are not the first thing to come to mind when it comes to his work. In a way, he is the ‘unflattening force’ of the show. However, his interventions choose objects whose colored surface is industrially flat; what is more ‘aplatudinary’ than a ping-pong table? The object presented here is covered in a layer of paint in the same colors as the original industrial object, not in flat, smooth surfaces, but in small brush marks – thus, the artist integrates the object into the wide world of painting.