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Artist: François Morellet

In 1957, François Morellet began a series of variations on patterns of L-shapes, all executed in oil paint on wooden panels measuring 80 cm by 80 cm. The series is called Répartition de 16 formes identiques [Distribution of 16 identical shapes]. Some of the paintings work with a highly legible, logical principle of symmetry, with the Ls slotted in to one another in a sort of puzzle in which the vertical and horizontal positions of the shape balance out across the panel. Others give the no doubt misleading impression of being more ‘disorganised’, pre-figuring the laws of chance that Morellet would officially usher in to his practice in 1958 with his Répartition aléatoire de triangles suivant les chiffres pairs et impairs d’un annuaire de téléphone [Chance distribution of triangles following the odd and even numbers of a phone book]. In that year, he also conceived of a new iteration of Répartition de 16 formes identiques. The painting exhibited here uses the same materials and has the same dimensions as the works from 1957, but this time Morellet has made use of the black and white colour scheme present in many of his chance distributions in 1958. As for the pattern, this comes from one of the 1957 paintings. The distribution, if one looks just at the organisation of the black and white space, seems to follow a set of rules in a protocol that brings to the fore the major role played by Morellet in the history of protoconceptualism. One can’t look at it without thinking of the different series Sol LeWitt made a few years later, and which would become the matrix for his wall drawings. Or without making a connection with the Ls that Robert Morris exhibited at Green Gallery in New York in 1965, even if Morris’ method and intentions were very different from Morellet’s. It nonetheless remains the case that between the mid 1950s and the 1960s, these ‘identical’ shapes inspired a number of creations that would mark the history, indeed the prehistory, of minimal, processual, systematic, or conceptual art.

The years 1957 and 1958 were in many ways critical for Morellet’s artistic career. In January 1957, he met Vera and François Molnar, who would become his fellow travellers for many decades. Morellet shared their vision of artforms derived from scientific methods and mathematical formulas. Like them, he would use systems that relegated subjectivity, free will, and superfluity to the margins. It was through François Molnar’s influence that in 1958 Morellet got his second solo show, at Colette Allendy Gallery, where he exhibited a number of his Répartitions de 16 formes identiques. Following the exhibition, Morellet published a text in which he argued for ‘a little more clarity’ in art, and a language ‘as simple and as unequivocal as possible’. In the text, he acknowledges his debt to Mondrian as well as to the Alhambra in Grenada. Morellet had encountered its arabesques in 1952 and they would have a lasting impression on him. ‘I remember,’ he said in an interview with Christian Besson, ‘the first time I saw these infinite arabesques, these interlacing forms, these positive-negative spaces, shockingly intelligent, I immediately got goosebumps.’ They would come back to him six years later.

—Erik Verhagen

Born in 1926, in Cholet, FRANÇOIS MORELLET died in 2016 in Cholet. An internationally recognized artist since the 1960s, he is the creator of many private and public commissions both in France and abroad, including the permanent installation L’Esprit d’escalier, made for the Lefuel Staircase of the Musée du Louvre in 2010.
François Morellet’s work has been exhibited in many venues, including the Dia Art Foundation in New York City and Dia: Beacon, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Musée d’Orsay, the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Center for Fine Arts in Brussels, S.M.A.K. in Ghent, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Mamco in Geneva, Documenta in Kassel, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden- Baden, the Museum Ritter in Waldenbuch, the Tate Gallery in London, the Modern Art Oxford, the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montréal, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Miami Arts Museum, and MoMA in New York.