Matter painting

also: Matterism · Haute Pâte

style technique c. 1940-1960 France Italy

Matter painting (French haute pâte, 'thick paste'), also known as matterism, is a style of painting that emphasizes the material qualities of paint through heavy impasto. It emerged in Paris in the 1940s in the work of Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier and reached widespread popularity in the 1950s, standing as the European counterpart to the gestural impulses of abstract expressionism. Part of the broader turn to Art Informel, it treats the picture surface as physical substance: paint thickened with sand, plaster, tar, burlap and other matter, scratched, gouged and layered until the image is inseparable from its material. Fautrier's Hostages paintings, made in hiding during the Occupation, gave the style its moral charge, and Alberto Burri and Antoni Tàpies carried it into assemblage.

Copy of the painting now in the Louvre made in 1786 to the Comte de Vaudreuil
Copy of the painting now in the Louvre made in 1786 to the Comte de VaudreuilPublic domain (credit: Anne-Louis Girodet / After Jacques-Louis David) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Heavy impasto: paint laid on thick enough to become relief
  • Gritty, encrusted surfaces mixing paint with non-art materials (sand, plaster, tar, burlap)
  • Muted, earthy palettes of ochre, grey, off-white and black
  • Scratched, scarred and gouged textures that keep the maker's gestures visible
  • Emphasis on the physical substance of the surface over depicted illusion
  • Near-abstract fields where figure and ground dissolve into matter

Key figures

  • Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) — French painter whose Hostages (Otages) paintings of 1943-1944 founded the matter painting approach
  • Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) — French painter who turned to thickened matter paste (Hautes Pâtes) after seeing Fautrier in 1945
  • Alberto Burri (1915-1995) — Italian artist who made matter itself the subject in his Sacchi (Sacks) from 1952
  • Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012) — Catalan painter of thick mineral surfaces who scaled matter painting up to wall-like pictures

Example works

  • Tête d'otage No. 14 (Head of a Hostage No. 14) — Jean Fautrier (1944)
  • Hautes Pâtes (Thick Impastoes) series — Jean Dubuffet (1945-1946)
  • Sacco e Rosso (Sack and Red) — Alberto Burri (1959)

Sources

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