Petite Construction

Painted in the final decade of Jean Fautrier’s (1898-1964) life, Petite Construction (1957) is a small composition consisting of a central, heavily impastoed, rectangular mound of claggy paint, set against a thin, roughly painted background of dirtied blue. The central form — which is so built up as to bulge out of the tableau in the manner of a relief — is predominantly coloured in a shimmering haze of mauve, with golden colouration visible in its upper section. It is delineated further through sharp, purple incisions of paint which echo its rectangular shape; a feature characteristic of Fautrier’s Constructions post-1957 [1].

Petite Construction is a prime example of Fautrier’s distinctive and well documented haute pâte (high paste) painting technique. To produce such pieces, Fautrier began by glueing several pieces of thick paper onto a stretched canvas support, upon which he would apply extremely thick, white paint with implements such as a palette knife or spatula in order to build up the centralised heap. Research has found that this paint is made up of a very fine plaster [2]. With the thick paste still moist, he would then apply colour through a dusting of powder and crushed pastels and further through ‘gouache, ink, and also oil paint’ [3]. As Fautrier himself has noted, these works were usually completed with relative speed, within the space of a day [4].

The origins of this working process can be found in Fautrier’s famous series of Otages paintings (1942-46) which, through their depiction of faces both mutilated and abstracted, respond to the atrocities committed by the Nazis in France during World War II. In a manner typical of the artist’s later period however, the subject matter of Petite Construction is less evident. Fautrier’s close friend, the art critic André Malraux, referred to his works of this time as ‘lyrical improvisations…of a slow ripening’, alluding to their non-objective quality [5]. Indeed, in its richly coloured and highly textured surface, Petite Construction emphasises the artist’s interest in probing the material limits of his medium.

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