Detail

Even though Martial Raysse belongs to the founding members of the Nouveaux Realistes he soon distances himself from their aesthetic that is determined by found objects. The language of forms invented by him shows close affinities to Anglo-American Pop Art. He shares an interest in the world of consumption, commerce and media. From 1972 onward he takes as his starting point photographical reproductions and creates paintings on which he synthetically spreads garish colors with the spray can and installs little ready-mades such as synthetic plants or flowers. In the same year he uses neon light for the first time as an immaterial color and expression of the modern world of life. Between 1960 and 1966 he creates numerous works like Ciné which work on female stereotypes from film and commercials. The subjects show women in banal situations like looking into the mirror, doing their personal hygiene or posing for a photograph. The artist however distances and masks his models to such an extent, that the idealized idyll freezes as it were to form a frighteningly aseptic and artificial world. The neon tube in form of the word ciné, cinema, refers to Raysse’s first experiments with film. His definition of cinema seems to hold true for Ciné as well: “Cinema is a convention. It is well known, that the actors will play a story, one eventually does not believe in. Thus I wanted everything to be as false as possible. Everything was meant to be false, the storyline incredible, the actors very bad, and the setting completely ridiculous.”