GRAV - Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel
«Strategies of Participation»
Curator: Yves Aupetitallot
7 June - 6 September 1998
Galleries

Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Joël Stein, Yvaral

The exhibition brings together a large number of individual and collective works over a playful course through the exhibition spaces, where the visitor participates being sollicited by optical works, mobiles, labyrinths, sets of stairs and exhibits that need activating.

The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, made up of Horacio Garcia Rossi, Julio Le Parc, François Morellet, Francisco Sobrino, Joël Stein, and Yvaral, was founded in 1960 and disbanded in 1968.

Over an eight year period the GRAV developed group activities based on a fundamental criticism of the notion of a masterpiece and its creator the artist, preferring instead an artistic approach rooted in the anonymity created by the group structure, imbued by a spirit of research and experimentation, that finds its fullest expression in an active reciprocal relationship with the onlooker.

Among their various works, the GRAV’s Labyrinths and playful Courses demonstrate, more than other works by their contemporaries, the principles of games, movement, optical work and participation as well as on a deeper level, suggesting a modified aesthetic of perception and a different vision of the status of the public and of art itself.

The GRAV exhibition, though of a retrospective nature, cannot be described as either historical or museographic. After thirty years, the artists have specially reunited the group and reactivated its working methods, particularly the democratic submittance of every proposal to each group member to ensure unanimity. They are responsible for the conception of the exhibition which they planned as a reactivation of their collective work and not as a critical presentation of a fossilized legacy. Each exhibition room, and all of them taken together, are conceived in terms of an overall arrangement, an oeuvre at once on the scale of each section as well as on the scale of the total exhibition space.

So the visitor will not follow any chronological or critical pronouncement of a body of work. Instead, he will instantly enter a space with painted black walls where the sole source of light is François Morellet’s dazzling 64 bulbs. Switching on and off with four superimposed rhythms. At the same time, he will be physically confronted by the elements of Théâtre Mobile, reminiscient of the piece produced in 1968 for the Maison de la Culture de Grenoble. In the following rooms, also invariably mainly black, he will be able to play with abacuses, try to decipher optically distorted phenomena, and proceed from one room to another in the labyrinth, wondering all the while what he will encounter next...
Some exhibitions can be recounted, described and photographed. This one can only be visited and experienced.

The Artists of the GRAV

Horacio Garcia Rossi
Born 1929 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. In 1950, he takes up studies at the Buenos Aires National School of Fine Arts, where he teaches drawing and painting up until 1958. During this time he meets Demarco, Le Parc and Sobrino. In 1959, he moves to Paris. Co-founder of the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel, and then of the GRAV in 1960.

Julio Le Parc
Born 1928 in Menodoza, Argentina. In 1942, he moves to Buenos Aires with his mother and brothers. From 1943 to 1946, and then from 1955 he studies at the Buenos Aires National School of Fine Arts where he meets Demarco, Garcia Rossi and Sobrino. In 1958, he moves to Paris, receiving a scholarship from the French Cultural Service. He meets Denise René and Victor Vasarely and then other future members of the GRAV. In 1959, first experimentations with light images reduced by layers of plexiglass. Co-founder of the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel in 1960.

François Morellet
Born 1926 in Cholet, France. Self-taught, François Morellet develops a scientific method applied to active visual stimulations. On the basis of a systematic and rational analysis of pictoral elements, herelocates, relying mainly on chance, elementary forms like lines and squares on a neutral background. Influenced by Max Bill’s concreticism whom he meets in Brasil, and against the tachisme of the Paris school Morellet tries to eliminate every personal trace of the artist, considering the canvas as a place for scientific experimentation rather than personal expression. Co-founder of the GRAV in 1960.

Francisco Sobrino
Born 1932 in Guadalajara, Espagne, Sobrino enrols in 1946 in the Madrid School of Craft and Fine Arts. In 1949, he moves to Argentina together with his family. From 1950 to 1957, he studies at the Buenos Aires School of Fine Arts, where he meets Demarco, Garcia Rossi and Le Parc. He moves to Paris in 1959, where he produces his systematic experiments of the surface and of form dynamics, interested in particular by changing perspectives and the correlation of colours. Co-founder of the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel and then of GRAV in 1960.

Joël Stein
Born 1926, in Saint-Martin Boulogne, France, Stein enrols in the Paris School of Fine Arts in 1946, where he frequents Fernand Léger’s atelier. In 1956, he produces his first geometrical paintings composed on a mathematical basis, and from 1958, develops the idea of the labyrinth, still two-dimensional at this point. In 1959, he produces his first manipulable reliefs. Co-founder of the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel and then of the GRAV in 1960.

Yvaral
Born 1934, in Paris, Jean-Pierre Yvaral studies at the Paris School of Applied Arts where he specialises in advertising and graphic design. Since 1954, he is engaged in visual research exploiting the different possibilities of optical activation given the systematic analysis of the visual function. From 1959 onwards, he produces his first optical accelerations in black and white as well as exploiting the shimmering effect of a weft of superimposed vinyl threads. In 1960, he is a co-founder of the Centre de Recherche d’Art Visuel, and then of the GRAV.