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Abstract
This article was first given as a conference paper for the symposium of ‘As Painting: Division and Displacement’, at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Colombus, Ohio in May 2001. It is concerned with the way three French painters, Daniel Dezeuze, François Rouan and Christian Bonnefoi have, since the end of the 1960s, proposed in their work alternative models of ‘non-composition’ and with a background of a dominant modernist heritage (the monochrome, the grid, the series, specific objects). Collage and tressage bring Rouan and Bonnefoi to a way of thinking about the ‘thickness of the surface’ (l’épaisseur du plan) nourished through such references as cubist collage and the works of Mondrian and Pollock. Dezeuze also shares such techniques when he uses tarlatan gauze cut-outs which dismantle the unity of the picture surface becoming three-dimensional and sculptural and opening up a critical approach in terms of questions of the mode of production of the works as well as their modes of occupying space and exhibition. The research around the practices here is resituated within a theoretical context typified by the thinking of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser where notions of division and displacement enter into a resonance with those of the division of the subject and the deconstruction of structure and ideological apparatuses.