Jean Messagier
Les portes du printemps, Peintures 1990-1994
March 20 - May 10, 2025Jean Messagier
Les portes du printemps, Peintures 1990-1994
March 20 - May 10, 2025
Ceysson & Bénétière is delighted to present a historic exhibition of the works of Jean Messagier, conceived in close collaboration with the artist’s studio. Among the last large-scale works of Messagier, the selected paintings highlight his production during the 1990s, a period that remains largely underappreciated.
Associated with the Second School of Paris as well as lyrical abstraction, Messagier belonged to a movement that was rejected by the subsequent generation of French artists in the late 1960s, a time when American abstraction dominated the art scene . Today, it is time to take a new look on artists like Messagier, whose complex careers far surpass the narrow labels often ascribed to them.
Rejecting rigid delimitations between abstraction and figuration, Messagier developed a unique artistic language that quickly gained him entry into the American art scene, earning him international acclaim. His multifaceted career was characterized by an ever-evolving philosophy. The elegant works he created in the 1990s, deceptively simple at first glance, synthesize the trajectory of his career. Moved by a desire for the "poetic amplification of all manifestations of life", Messagier seemed to reinvent his artistic vocabulary every decade.
After the exuberant figurative works of the 1980s, his paintings from the 1990s moved toward a more serene abstraction, a subtle synthesis of the preceding decades. These canvases merged the balance of the 1950s, the dynamism of the 1960s, and the poetry of the 1970s and 1980s. By playing with pictorial layers and translucencies, his compositions exude a force that feels both soft and elemental. Applied with broad brushes, his colors vibrate with rare sensuality while his evocative titles create a tension between abstraction and figuration.
Promoting complete artistic freedom, in the 1990s, Messagier produced works of extraordinary intensity. His energy and poetic depth remained undiminished, resulting in an explosion of vibrant, unprecedentedly intense colors, as exemplified in a series of radiant paintings from this period, which draws clear connections to the work of artists associated with Color Field painting and American abstraction, such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Mark Rothko, whom Messagier had met during his first solo exhibition in New York in 1960. The 1990s also marked a return to more explicit figuration, opening new creative pathways that Messagier did not have the opportunity to fully explore.
This exhibition offers a rare chance to delve into a pivotal period in Messagier’s career through works that reveal the profound richness of an artist in constant evolution. Today, his works have entered the permanent collections of renown museums across Europe and the United States, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, and more recently, the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Artist : Jean Messagier
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