Claude Viallat studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier from 1955 to 1959, then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1962-63, in Raymond Legueult’s workshop. In 1966, he adopts a process based on fingerprints, which shall enter into a critical radical of the lyrical abstraction and geometric (in technique called All-over). A neutral form is repeated on a free canvas without frame determining the composition of the work. In 1969, he was a founding member of Supports / Surfaces.
In addition to the growing success of its exhibitions in France (at the Pompidou Center in 1982) and abroad (Venice Biennale in 1988), he devoted himself to his work as a teacher in the art schools following: Nice, Limoges, Marseille, Nîmes (where he was director for many years), then Paris at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris.
Claude Viallat has been a contentious defender of modernism since 1964, when he began working with the idea repeated pattern to refuse the idea of subject. Since then he has eschewed stretchers or frames. This repeated shape has become Viallat’s trademark and signature and figures on all kinds of surfaces, from rugs, tents, curtains and other loose fabrics, endlessly repeating itself, yet always creating something new.
