Ohne Titel
1969Acrylic on canvas100 x 100 cmThis painting belongs to a series of around two hundred circle paintings that Olivier Mosset created between 1966 and 1974. The works in this series, the total number of which is uncertain, were first brought to the public’s attention by the French artist group BMPT in 1967. Alongside its youngest member Mosset (M), the other members of BMPT, which existed only until the end of that year, were Daniel Buren (B), Michel Parmentier (P), and Niele Toroni (T). Like them, Mosset was working on a fundamental overhaul of painting at the time. His artist friends supported him in his striving for what Edmond Charriere has described as “neutral, anonymous, eventless painting.”¹ To emphasize this aspect of his work, Mosset took to painting the same picture over and over again, applying the same reiterative principle as that embraced by Niele Toroni. Producing a whole series of formally identical paintings that are neither signed nor dated was a way of putting notions of authorship, creativity, and above all “the work” up for debate. The circle paintings are white-primed canvases measuring 100 × 100 cm, at the center of which is a ring of 15.2 cm in diameter painted in black acrylic paint. For Mosset, the circle paintings were just as much a tool of aesthetic reflection as his compass and brush were tools of their creation. The works belong to a particular time and raised what, for the young painter, were the burning questions implicit in all works of art. But what has hitherto been overlooked, or so it seems to me, is the meaning of the circle from which they derive their name. Does the black ring define a white circle in the center of a white-primed canvas? Or did Mosset paint the ring in the center of a white square as a means of structuring the pictorial field, albeit with the paradoxical aim of creating a non-hierarchical and directionless composition? One visual answer to this question of the relationship between figure and ground, which is what we are basically talking about here, is to be found in Mosset’s ring-shaped painting Untitled (2002), which belongs to the Ricola Collection. Mosset’s interest in monochrome painting, especially after 1977 when he relocated to the USA, grew out of the same conceptual understanding of what a painting actually is. This, then, is where he found the point zero that he, like so many others, had sought as a young artist. Thus he succeeded in producing works that really did represent the new beginning that so many artists had hoped for after 1945. Having drained the canvas of all content, he henceforth made coloration his sole subject. There would be no more composition, no more drawing—just wall-filling formats. Not surprisingly, color came to play an increasingly important role in Mosset’s oeuvre, with ultra-fine nuances sometimes monopolizing the whole of his attention. In his mature work, the medium is the message— meaning not the painted surface of the canvas but the corpus of the painting in its specific manifestation.
Roman Kurzmeyer
¹ Edmond Charriere, “Niemals wird ein Pinselstrich die Malerei abschaffen,” in Sophie Ott (ed.), Olivier Mosset, Baden 1990, pp. 13–19, here p. 14.
