Figuration Libre
also: Free figuration
Figuration Libre ('free figuration') is a French movement of the early 1980s that returned to bold, comic-inflected figuration after two decades of conceptual and minimalist art. Its young painters - Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa, Rémi Blanchard and François Boisrond among them - drew on graffiti, comics, rock music and naive art, painting quickly in flat saturated color with heavy outlines and jumbled, high-energy compositions. They were grouped with the international 'return to painting' alongside the German Neue Wilden and the Italian Transavanguardia. Their subjects are ordinary, funny and deliberately lowbrow - crowds, monsters, musicians and street life - treated with a spontaneity that dismisses modernist seriousness and makes the painted surface look like a page or a wall.
Defining characteristics
- Cartoonish, graffiti-like figures drawn from pop culture and street life
- Flat, saturated color held together by heavy black outlines
- Fast, visible brushwork with deliberately naive or 'bad' drawing
- Dense, busy compositions teeming with incident and text
- Humor, irreverence and lowbrow subject matter in place of high-art solemnity
Key figures
- Robert Combas (b. 1957) — Leading painter of the movement's raucous crowd scenes
- Hervé Di Rosa (b. 1959) — Painter and multimedia artist of cartoon-derived characters
- Rémi Blanchard (1958-1993) — Painter of raw, playful figuration and animal motifs
- François Boisrond (b. 1959) — Painter of fast, poster-like scenes of everyday life
Sources
- Figuration Libre - Wikipedia encyclopedia