What happened through painting

The term "re-examination" appears in a formulation by Simon Hantaï on the subject of his painting A Galla Placidia from the years 1958-1959: he writes exactly "retrospective review of 10 years of work". Considering all of the texts and interviews in this collection, this word seems both appropriate for to designate what this book intends to offer the reader — the opportunity for a re-examination of what a painter has written and said in conjunction with what he has painted — and adequate to what Simon Hantaï himself embodied during his existence: a resolution to reexamine itself without respite and whatever the consequences. It is not only a matter of considering such a reality - for example the painting — with a very particular attention which leads to never forgetting it to satisfy but, in addition, to be inhabited by an uncertainty which motivates this a truly interminable re-examination. The texts and interviews collected below, allow us to follow and probably better understand what is happening with the paintings that Simon Hantaï has been circulating since he went into exile in Paris from September 1948 and then came into contact with André Breton and the surrealists. To understand Simon Hantaï's painting, one must not naturally not hear that the various statements which follow and which running over fifty years will make the gestures of this painter transparent or obvious. He did not want them to be so for himself. He who goes claiming folding as a “method” from 1960 onwards meant breaking with the old pictorial logic and start again with a seemingly simpler activity by folding canvases. Hantaï follows his method of folding to discover new, rather than variations of an imaginary that he considers hackneyed. "I don't I don't want an answer that assures me of something, I don't want any answer, I want the absolute non-answer, that is to say, infinity." Reading these texts and interviews, we will enter better into a thought of painting having allowed the updating of the painter's own consciousness, which does not guarantee not that we will know how to look at this painting better.