PUBLICATIONS

Exhibition catalog at the Alexis Pentcheff Gallery from May 13 to July 15, 2022

André Masson is one of the most important painters of the 20th century. His involvement in the surrealist movement, his American experience and more generally his singular approach to painting, make him one of the necessary links between pre-war painting and the art of the second half of the 20th century.

During his lifetime, his fame was very great. However, our generation has somewhat forgotten him... In the light of the 21st century, which is now ours, it seems that we are in a better position than ever to apprehend his work, especially since we have lived through the turn of the 2020s. The themes that are dear to him have taken on new resonances in our lives.

A "wise" painter rather than an intellectual or scholar, André Masson enriched his life as well as his painting with his readings, notably philosophical, in an attempt to grasp the bubbling order of a universe where he experienced in his flesh the violence of two wars. In this sense, his painting is a teaching.

As a painter-poet, he expresses more than a reality through the image, and his painting is a direct vibration of the forces of nature of which he is the medium.

Masson awakens us, awakens us, as others, Sade, Novalis or Nietszche for example, have tried to do before him, in their own way. He helps us to accept the upheavals of our time, to think the world of today, to accept to see the violence that we hid from our eyes and that has never ceased to inhabit the human beings that we are, since the dawn of time, both momentum and pure sabotage.

Here is the raw world, says Masson, without disguise, the one to which we belong whatever the cost, this world at the same time immutable and in perpetual movement, by the effect of the same forces which underlie it.
The veil is lifted, everything is only metamorphosis.

Masson should appear clearly as a destroyer of false pretenses, a visionary, capable of sharing his dazzling clairvoyances. He should appear to us as the one who, with his hand, opens the curtains, not to discover the stage of the show but to reveal its unsuspected underside, the backstage. He who reaches out to us, offers us his salutary mythology, which is nothing more than an open window on the human soul. In a word, Masson should appear to us as a prophet.