SERGE POLIAKOFF: LES ÉTÉS DE POLIAKOFF
Almine Rech Paris, Matignon is pleased to present 'Les étés de Poliakoff', Serge Poliakoff's second solo exhibition with the gallery.
January 11 - March 1, 2025
Throughout his life, Poliakoff’s true experiments were in his gouaches, which he painted in the summer as part of a daily practice. "He always painted a series of four gouaches," his son Alexis recalls. "Every morning, he began a new series, revisiting those drying from previous days, making additions or corrections. After spending his mornings on this, he would head to the races." This routine yielded 30–40 series of gouaches over the summer. Poliakoff reviewed his work, signing one sheet from the series he found fulfilling, selecting a dozen or so as inspirational motifs. Back in the studio, these served as the foundation for new oil paintings.
The uniqueness of Poliakoff’s gouaches lies in their space for exploration and discovery. While they suggest distinct sounds, words, or phrases, their meanings are grasped intuitively, through emotions and feelings. The gouaches resemble inscriptions from a lost pictographic script, whose key is misplaced because humanity has changed not only its means of expression but its reasons for doing so.
In a 1966 interview, Francis Bacon distinguished between painting as illustration and painting as fact. As an example, he cited a Self-Portrait attributed to Rembrandt in the museum at Aix-en-Provence. He observed that the eyes in the portrait were scarcely defined, yet the face emerges compellingly through seemingly arbitrary, abstract, ‘non-representational’ marks. These marks, when combined, evoke the presence of the subject.
In his summer gouaches, Poliakoff embraced seriality. Four variations on a motif—using the same "actors" or "emotions" (colors, lines, shapes etc.)—allowed him to consistently pose artistic questions and compare answers. His art queried: the inseparability of color and form, embodying unity and diversity of the existence; the ineffability of painting, challenging language’s limits; the indivisibility of process and result, embodying time’s flow. Their interplay evokes a dialogue’s essence—where proximity is possible, fusion is not.