Martin Barré

Private Collection, Holland

Thence by descent to the present owner

66-2-A-81x65 is a quintessential example from one of Martin Barré’s most celebrated and rare series, the ‘bombes’ or ‘spray’ works. This was a particularly innovative period in his career which saw the creation of more than 150 works on paper and canvas from 1963 to 1967. What makes this series so extraordinary is the precocious use of black aerosol spray can to create these monochrome abstractions for which the artist is arguably most known.

The 1960s was a time of great artistic turmoil in Paris. While his Parisian peers, such as Georges Mathieu or Hans Hartung, were producing ‘lyrical’ abstractions, Barré sought perfect minimalism in isolation from his atelier in Paris’ Marais arrondissement. His minimalism is in utter contradiction to the swirls and bright colours of the other Parisian artists and far closer to the works of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. 

Barré had been constantly experimenting with the medium of painting since the 1950s. His earlier works saw him experimenting with discarding the paintbrush in favour of palette knives, wooden slats and even squeezing the paint directly from its tube. The artist had also pushed the boundaries of his paintings into space by stretching his compositions across the borders of numerous canvases in his series of polyptychs. 

But it was the ‘bombes’or aerosol works that represented arguably the most important breakthrough in Barré’s artistic research. After experimenting with different colours, the artist settled for the dichotomous purity of black on white. Once this binary had been established, the artist executed a series of different ‘compositions’ ranging from the circle, to the ‘cravate’, to the crossed out line, to the arrow.   

The spray can allowed the artist to entirely remove any direct contact between himself and the canvas. This innovative ‘painting’ technique, more commonly used to industrial ends, offered an all-in-one colour palette, paintpot, and paintbrush, creating a unique texture, positioning and thickness which were only partially within the artist’s control. 

The pressurized gas also allowed, for the first time in the artist’s oeuvre, for the painting to truly begin outside the ‘frame’ of the canvas, meaning that paintings like 66-2-A-81x65 seem to continue outside of the physical limits of the canvas, ‘out of shot’. Critics have likened the point and ‘shoot’ quality of spray paint to a cinematic creation. Michaelangelo Antonioni’s notorious film Blow-Up, which evokes similar anxieties about the role of the author in the narration of the story of a photographer who finds himself involved in a gun crime after shooting an image in a park, was released the year before the execution of 66-2-A-81x65. Les peintures de cette période évoquent également les concepts spatialistes de Lucio Fontana, qui, à la même époque à Milan, repoussait avec fougue les limites de la peinture.

Critics at the time described the works as an act of ‘anti-painting’ and Barré himself acknowledged in an interview with Catherine Millet in 1988 that he had, “neared the limit of painting” with the ‘bombes’ works. The present painting was in fact included in a show in Rome's Villa Medici entitled, ‘Painting or how to free oneself of it’. This series was, in fact, so impactful that Barré ceased painting entirely for four years, just one year after the execution of 66-2-A-81x65. This series was not only a bombshell for Martin Barré, but a turning point in the history of art, and the present painting represents one of the finest iterations.