Jean Messagier

Jean Messagier was a French painter, sculptor, printmaker and poet. Jean Messagier had his first solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie ArcenCiel in 1947. From 1945 to 1949 the artist worked under the influence of Pablo Picasso, Andr Masson, Paul Klee and Franois Desnoyer160 , his professor at cole nationale suprieure des arts dcoratifs in Paris. Messagier again was revealed to the public at an exhibition organized by Charles Estienne at the Galerie de Babylone in 1952, entitled La Nouvelle cole de Paris . The following year, Messagier deliberately broke away from his expressionistic form of PostCubism his inspirations now focused on Jean Fautrier and Pierre TalCoat to develop a personal vision in which he renders light...approached abstractly. Jean Messagier is often associated with Lyrical abstraction, Tachisme, Nuagisme, Art informel and paysagisme abstrait, though the artist himself had never accepted any labels, and had always refused the distinction between abstraction and figurati

During the winter of 1969 Messagier elaborated a technique he called le Gel in an effort to perfect a certain number of compositions whereby nature itself would intervene in the creative process. These paintings were realized outside of his studio at the Moulin de Lougres between two streams, where the calm of the land was superimposed with the turbulent current of the water and air. For Messagier the process was equivalent to sculpting air, and the works became replicas of air itself influenced by liquid. Both solid and liquid would intermingle, one born from the other. His goal had been the reconciliation between art and life, between man and nature. Both abstraction and figuration could play a role. This was not the pitting of human nature against nature itself, but the fusion of the two. From the early 1950s Messagier had put into question the utility of debating the concepts of abstraction and figuration. Now both had been surpassed.

Source: Wikipedia