En l’absence de l’artiste. Claude Morini. Claude Morini. Exhibition from 18 January to 1 February 2014 A friend of the artist’s children, Eva Vautier, still a…
En l’absence de l’artiste. Claude Morini. Claude Morini. Exhibition from 18 January to 1 February 2014 A friend of the artist’s children, Eva Vautier, still a teenager, came across Claude Morini, paintings under his arm, on the stairs of his house. On the occasion of the publication of the catalogue raisonné of his prints – published by stArt and L’Ormaie – and of the tribute paid to him by the city of Nice – an exhibition of the entire engraved oeuvre – she offers her space for a fortnight. The gallery normally presents young, living artists in contemporary art exhibitions. This time, the artist is not here. On 22 May 1982, at the age of 43, Claude Morini had left this world. Only part of a body of work is present here, one that was not already being called contemporary at the time. Executed in ink, with pastels or charcoal, pencil and genuine brushes, this is the work of an “easel painter”! No happenings, no video, but a smell of turpentine… recalling a time when the artist was already painting against the current of the Nice avant-gardes… Claude Morini chose to leave. But he did not take his work with him. It is “in the artist’s absence” but very much “in the presence of the work” that Eva Vautier has chosen to present Morini. F B. Claude has departed on tiptoe, and somewhere, beside Monique, he is happy, while down here his children keep watch, always with the greatest vigilance, over the soul of this moving painting, born of the heart and of the love of a desperately free man. Frédéric ALTMANN, in Claude Morini, La passion de peindre, Editions stArt – 2002 I remember, I was younger, and we thought, with object art, that we had buried Morini, Vigny and the rest. In fact Morini went on painting what mattered. How could I have known that Morini suffered so much from art? That he wanted to say everything and kept circling around it? (4/07/2001) If I had been in charge of culture in Nice, I would have put Morini in the Mamac, even at the risk of a complete blackout from Paris and of hearing them call us hopelessly square. (14/06/2005) Ben VAUTIER, Ben-vautier.com “Yes, the essential is invisible… But the painter needs matter, a canvas cannot remain white“. Did he suspect that, in stating his truth, he would at once risk being opposed by the champions of emptiness in painting, for whom a canvas that remains white is not silence but expression? (…) Claude Morini had accepted once and for all that a work of art is the alliance of a form and a thought, whereas everyone around him dissected now one, now the other. Pierre PROVOYEUR, in Claude Morini, La passion de peindre, Editions stArt – 2002 Morini, I dare to write it, never painted anything but the anguish of death, even when hope or the expectation of pleasure could be read in the gaze of his figures. Max GALLO, in Hommage à Morini, Retrospective catalogue, Château Musée de Cagnes-sur-Mer, March 1985 As a child, he was close to painting, notably that of his maternal grandfather, a Hungarian…
