ART GALLERYGALERIE GRIPPALDI

Serge Poliakoff's work is today recognized as one of abstraction most important work, and even of modern painting. "When a painting is silent, it means that it is successful ... a shape must be rendered and not visible," said Serge Poliakoff to Michel Ragon, his first historiographer. Like his paintings, the painter was silent, interiorized, inhabited by serenity and curious about the painting's mysteries. Challenging prohibitions, it was of great importance, to him, to reveal the concealed layers and the modifications that these underlying colors were bringing to upper layers.
Here is a work “Composition Bleu, Blanc, Rouge" of 1962 which, in its apparent simplicity, imposes its formidable capacity to reduce elements composing it, which is born from the contradiction between the colors and the contradiction between forms. In this work, Serge Poliakoff is at the edge of the precipice, in balance between sensual physical matter and inner light, between business and spirit, between reflection and love. Meditative love of pictorial elements become simple and silent architecture, a kind of spiritual meditation about presence.
This painting shows an inner light generated by the depth of the tones, the balance of the forms between them and the intense vibrations of the material. It is this color-matter that gives shapes their obviousness. The artifice here joins formal complexity after being, at first, distant.