Le Valais et ses hasards

François Morellet (Cholet, France, 1926-2016)
Collection : Fonds d'art contemporain de la Ville et du Canton de Genève (FMAC et FCAC)

François Morellet’s neon piece for the Valais Tunnel is part of a special civil engineering work: under the railways, an underground passage used by motorists, cyclists and pedestrians needed to be illuminated. On the raw concrete of the black ceiling, a network of bright blue neon tubes – overlapping straight lines – draw diagonals spanning the full length of the passage. In a geometric and abstract manner, the ends of the neon tubes point to metallic upper-case letters, L and E, V and A, L and A, I and S, distributed high up on the walls according to a virtual alphabet, spelling out LE VALAIS, an allusion to the name of the site. Thus, the artist delegates the elaboration of his motif to a system based on a previously codified framework. Minimalist, clean and functional, the illuminated zig-zag ricocheting against the tunnel walls becomes a language game. A mathematics enthusiast, lover of logic games and friend of pataphysics, throughout his career François Morellet developed a work method enabling him to dispose of the problem of subjectivity. After his figurative beginnings, his painting veered into abstraction in the 1950s. With a lexicon of simple shapes and solid colors, and by using frameworks, he strove to anteriorly control the production of works that ironically always eluded him somewhat.
Article commissioned by P3Art
Notice: Séverine Fromaigeat, translation: Matthew Cunningham