Daniel Dezeuze was one of the founding members of Supports/Surfaces (1969-74), together with Claude Viallat, Louis Cane, Vincent Bioulès, Marc Devade and Bernard Pagès, amongst others. In 1971, alongside Bioulès, Cane and Devade, he co-founded the journal Peinture-Cahiers théoriques [Painting, Theoretical Notebooks] as a vehicle for the group’s principles. The journal focused on radical criticism of the art market, art’s economic and political context, and linked the group’s creative praxis to political theory. The Supports/Surfaces artists believed that an artwork’s meaning lay solely in its material characteristics. They deconstructed traditional painting and explored it exclusively via support, colour and surface. At the same time, they also investigated the potential of serial production. The group’s work is very eclectic. While Cane mainly concentrated on the canvas, Dezeuze focused on the stretcher.
Dezeuze replaced the canvas with a sheet of transparent plastic for his first work, Châssis avec feuille de plastique tendue [Frame with stretched plastic sheeting] (1967). We see a fragment of reality: a frame leaning against the wall. The work’s composition is determined by the structure of the frame, while the illusionary pictorial space of the canvas has disappeared. Dezeuze’s oeuvre evolved from the rigid wooden ladders he created in the 1970s to ethereal, featherweight sculptures made from gauze-covered frames. To these he would attach colourfully painted wooden cubes and beads. His work hovers between painting and sculpture, and between two and three dimensions. Continuing to explore the fundamentals of painting, the artist also created assemblages of found objects from the late 1980s onwards. They reference rural life and include fruit baskets and small vermin traps. Dezeuze is also known for his drawings, poetry and theoretical texts on art.
Dezeuze has been dissecting the medium of painting since the 1970s. He created Extensibles (1969), Echelles de bois souple [Flexible wooden ladders] (1970) and Claies inachevées [Unfinished trellises] (1976) out of pliable wood veneer. These ladder- or trellis-like structures are either straight or curved and exhibited flat on the floor or propped against a wall. Wood veneer quickly reverts to its original, curled, scroll-like shape: a property that the artist frequently exploited. Empty space is a fundamental component of the lattice structures. In making these works, the artist borrowed the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu, who believed that emptiness was a great motivating force. In the mid-1990s, Dezeuze also made grids in hard, rigid materials, including thick, flat, wooden examples sandwiched between metal plinths. These works continued to offer an explicit and ironic commentary on traditional painting. This subsequently became even more implicit. In 2000, Dezeuze started to make structures in yet other materials, such as oval forms made of curved, gridded, polyethylene panels. The boundaries between painting and sculpture are again blurred, which is a constant in Dezeuze’s oeuvre.
