Artist: Claude Viallat

Templon Brussels is marking the 60th anniversary of Claude Viallat’s signature motif with an exhibition bringing together his most recent works, paintings as well as objects.

A leading figure and founding member of the avant-garde Supports/Surfaces group, Claude Viallat has spent six decades pushing the boundaries of painting. He does so by endlessly reworking his distinctive bone-shaped mark, across a wide range of fabrics and tarpaulins, loosely hung throughout the space. First emerging in the summer of 1966, this “ form of chance” unfolds through repetition, shaped by variation and accident.

“I feel like an unconscious at work,” he says, embracing an open-ended, experiment-driven approach. The exhibition features around thirty experimental canvases produced between 2024 and 2026. By multiplying the motif, the artist breaks up the pictorial space: “It’s as if there were only one huge, ideal canvas, and I am cutting fragments from it. So each canvas, can in theory continue, or reverberate in other canvases.” Every piece thus reads as part of a boundless pictorial continuum, with no clear beginning or end, turning the exhibition space into an immersive environment that invites both contemplation and wandering.

Viallat’s objects, which he began exploring as early as 1969, follow the same impulse to dismantle the traditional canvas and free up gesture. Far from being a departure, they are integral to his practice. Made from driftwood, rope, and planks, these works, part travel mementos, part echoes of a childlike imagination, reflect his ongoing engagement with everyday materials, at the heart of a practice that constantly tests its own limits.