Olivier Mosset

Untitled, 1974

Radical – this term characterizes not only the direction of abstract painting, which Olivier Mosset co-created in New York in the seventies, but also, and even more so, the substance of the work and the attitude of the artist. The foundation of all this was Mosset’s political involvement in the political unrest in May 1968, which he experienced personally as he was working in Paris at the time. Olivier Mosset’s tic tac toe series is a self-critical summary of his work from 1968 until today. The early black and white circular pictures now turn into colored ‘shaped canvases’. The crosses also look at previous paintings with sized crosses, back then inserted into each other. “Maybe the reason I’m doing the work is just to know what it is about. In a way a constant of the evolution of contemporary practices has been their self-criticism and I believe a kind of death wish. That’s what the tic tac toe paintings seem to bring forward: the traditional rectangular format of the painting seems to be questioned because the canvasses are shaped and the unity of the painting is destroyed because these works are composed with groups of independent small canvases.” (Olivier Mosset)