Olivier Mosset's Objective Painting at Musée Régional de Sérignan

The exhibition of Olivier Mosset at the Musée Régional d'Art Contemporain in Sérignan, running from March 9 to June 12, 2013, showcases the artist's decades-long project of neutralizing subjectivity to reduce painting to its most objective elements. Mosset's monochromes and geometric abstractions are anonymous and mechanical, asserting literal presence without representational or expressive function. The show includes mural paintings reproducing a motif found at the Cuartel de Zapata in Mexico, and the colored bipartition of hospital corridors. X- and O-shaped canvases reference the affectionate American sign-off 'xoxo', while series of black-and-white or other-colored monochromes, sometimes executed by others but signed by the artist, present a standardized facture devoid of gesture. A former member of the BMPT group in the 1960s, and associated with Radical Painting and Neo-Geo in the 1980s, Mosset removes the author and his singularity to empty painting of meaning beyond the formal. The work directs attention to strictly material qualities: the sensuality of granular surfaces, the way they reflect or absorb light. This painting signifies itself, foreign to symbolism or interiority, rich in concrete, sensual yet mute qualities.