Although many of Hantaï’s works of pliage feature jewellike hues, he also created a number of these works featuring only black paint on bare canvas. LES NOIRS DU BLANC, LES BLANCS DU NOIR explores this subset of the artist’s oeuvre: unmediated by color, the monochromatic paintings and prints celebrate the aesthetic form of the crease and document Hantaï’s evolving relationship with the act of painting.

On view are four large-scale oil and acrylic paintings from Hantaï’s series of Études. Produced in the late 1960s at the height of his experimentation with the pliage method, the series illustrates his efforts to eliminate the artist’s hand from the painting process. Featuring a network of crisp creases of unpainted canvas spanning the composition, the Études conjure familiar images from nature—an undergrowth of leaves, perhaps, or a flock of birds in flight—but ultimately dissolve into pure abstraction.

Hantaï became a French citizen in 1966 and gained increasing recognition over the next two decades, culminating in an invitation to represent France at the 1982 Venice Biennale. Months later, however, he withdrew from the public eye, refusing to exhibit new works until 1998. Following this period of seclusion, Hantaï began altering his existing pieces—namely, one set of enormous pliage paintings exhibited in 1981 at CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux. He photographed these 50-foot-long paintings from an angle and created black-and-white silkscreen prints from the distorted photographic images, which he cropped vertically and printed amid stripes of white canvas. To Hantaï, silkscreen printing and pliage were inherently linked; both involved repeating an established technique to produce subtle variations.

For his Laissées (Leftovers), Hantaï sliced the Bordeaux paintings into smaller sections and displayed each one as a new work in itself. Paradoxically, by taking a craft knife to the large compositions, he simultaneously inflicted an irreversible act of violence upon his own art and preserved the most fundamental visual components of his pliage paintings. Hantaï continued to work largely in isolation until his death in 2008, leaving behind a corpus of fractal-like compositions whose surfaces dramatize the intersection of intentional and incidental mark making.