Pierre Wat's Monograph on Claude Viallat's Enduring Practice

Pierre Wat has authored a monograph on Claude Viallat, examining the artist's forty-year commitment to a singular form. The book addresses the challenge of writing about an artist whose work is defined by fidelity to repetition. Viallat's practice involves endlessly repeating a shape resembling a knucklebone, with occasional forays into tauromachies. He works flat on tent canvas with acrylics and worker's tools, emphasizing process over finished paintings. Wat describes Viallat's system as a means to enable painting, focusing on making and unmaking to unlearn. Viallat sees painting as concretizing a relationship between self and world through color, with the trace later becoming image. The monograph offers an analytical commentary on this rigorous and just body of work, which Wat calls a nightmare for art historians due to its resistance to description. Viallat's approach references art history while avoiding imitation, demonstrating that referenced artists created open works with unexplored territories. The book was published in 2006.