MARTIAL RAYSSE
Vallauris Golfe-Juan (France), 1936  

He found his vocation as an artist at an early stage, in the late fifties replacing Informalist aesthetics with works constructed from objects of everyday use. This led him to join Pierre Restany’s New Realists, with whom he participated in various group exhibitions. In 1961, after taking part in The Art of Assemblage at the MoMA, he broke away from the group and adopted a painting style connected with Pop Art. This marked the beginning of a long period in his career that he called hygiène de la vision (visual hygiene). He was included in The New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. In 1962, in the group exhibition Dylaby at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, he presented his installation Raysse Beach, with which he materialised his “Côte d’Azur” aesthetics of exaltation of the joy of living, using neon for the first time. In 1964 he took part in the group exhibition Mythologies quotidiennes at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and in New York and Los Angeles he presented his series Tableaux Horribles (Horrible Pictures) and Made in Japan, in which he played with the trivilisation of the history of art.
From 1965 onwards he used various languages and means of expression simultaneously. He simplified his paintings by using outlines and archetypal forms that shared the picture space with materials such as Plexiglass and projected images. In 1966 he undertook his first theatre project, working in association with Tinguely and Nikki de Saint-Phalle on a complex set design for the ballet L’Éloge et la Folie, choreographed by Roland Petit. The short time Jésus Cola (1966) marked the start of his cinema activity, which, after various attempts, including works on video, culminated with the experimental full-length film Le Grand Départ (1970). He distanced himself from the official channels of art and between 1970 and 1973 he worked closely with the Pig group, with which he participated in various happenings and collective works. After a return to the assemblages of his early period, as in Coco Mato, for which he adopted primitive aesthetics, in the mid-seventies he produced works on video while at the same time making  his first attempts to return to the classical genres and formats of painting. His Loco Bello (Handsome Fool) drawings were followed by the series Spelunca (Cave), 1978, with Mediterranean themes, and La Petite Maison (The Little House), 1980, in which he represented domestic objects. His monumental sculptures of the eighties were followed in the nineties by paintings that went back to the concept of the craft of painting, with the adoption of perspective, drawing and modelling.