Simon Hantaï – Tables (1978)

Louisiana poster with work from the series, Tables (table, board, boards), by the Hungarian artist, Simon Hantaï (1922-2008), which Louisiana exhibited in 1978. Some perceive Hantaï's "squares" as grids, imprisoning prison bars—on others it seems the invigorating, cheerful and poetic: the squares are broken and bent, and small wedges shoot over the colored fields. Pictures with a lyrical content, but also subject to a fixed rhythm, like a pulse that could be the artist's own.

Hantaï joined the Ecole de Paris after many years of living in the French capital and has, among other things, drawn inspiration from Matisse's later works and from the American abstract expressionist, Jack Pollack.

For Hantaï, too, Paris offered a rediscovered freedom, a favorable working environment and the first contacts with surrealism. He set out to test a myriad of painting techniques and genres and almost ended up with a compendium of the history of painting from 1920 to 1950—which he had to go through the entire development all over again to find himself.

In the wake of Pollock and 50s action painting, Hantaï broke with surrealism and was self-selected through a series of development phases and genres throughout his work.