A major artist of abstract painting, Monique Frydman returns to the Musée des Beaux-Arts almost thirty years after the exhibition devoted to her Dames de nage in 1995. The artist continues to explore the techniques and materials to which she has remained faithful since the beginning of her career: gradual impregnation of pigments and pastels on a variety of supports, linen canvas, cotton, Japanese paper and tarlatans.
Faced with these works, the viewer is seized by the desire to immerse oneself in the color and light that characterize her pictorial language. Monique Frydman?s proposal, entitled L?Âge d?or (The Golden Age), pays homage to this timeless subject of Western painting, a variation on the myth of a time free of all suffering. Through it, the artist reaffirms his commitment as a painter and explores his personal history, from the clandestine years of his early childhood in the Tarn region during the Second World War to the creation of the Sassetta Polyptych, a monumental work executed for the Salon Carré at the Musée du Louvre in 2013.
The dispersal through the ages of the famous polyptych signed in 1444 by the Sienese painter Stefano di Giovanni, known as Sassetta, led Monique Frydman to imagine a monumental, abstract altarpiece that questions notions of disappearance and fragmentation: what was an untouchable, invulnerable masterpiece at the time of its creation, was subsequently extracted from the sacred site, dismembered and dispersed.
Entering into "friendship" with the language of ancient painting, the artist presents a group of works created over the last ten years, carrying high the vitality of abstract painting, at once carnal and spiritual, primitive and inventive. She invites us to reflect deeply on questions of trace, imprint and transmission.
This exhibition is also the 8th edition of the Résonnance cycle.
