What Happened Through Painting. Texts and Interviews, 1953–2006.

Of Simon Hantaï (1922-2008), we usually only remember the brilliant paintings born from 1960 onwards from the "folding as a method" and his attitude, so unusual today, of silent withdrawal from the art world and its market. This amounts to obscuring a little too quickly that his work was developed in Paris from 1948 and that it was regularly accompanied by declarations and sometimes polemical positions constituting as a whole a constant effort to grasp through thought what happened through painting .
Nourished by his association with painters, poets and philosophers, with surrealists, friends and then enemies, with past works and those still present by Cézanne, Pollock, Matisse and also Michaux, his astonished questioning of art is a precious guide for us in reading his painting.
This collection of rare or unpublished texts and interviews from 1953 to 2006 allows us to reconstruct the multiple threads of this thought which is developed through the pictorial material itself.