Catalogue devoted to Niki de Saint Phalle's Tableaux éclatés (Burst paintings), a vast series of works created as an homage to Jean Tinguely after his death—paintings composed of cut-out shapes set in motion by motorized devices as spectators pass by (drawing on Tinguely's "Méta-reliefs" formula while developing Niki de Saint Phalle's own themes and plastic vocabulary)—, first shown at the ARC in 1993, in the artist's retrospective exhibition orchestrated by Suzanne Pagé. The book's pop-up cover allows to recompose the pattern of a painting using pull tabs!
"Hymn of love. Cannibalism. Communion.
Jean - I devour you. I absorb your strength. Your soul joins mine.
Breakdown, movement, now belong to me too.
Waiting for the breakdown, waiting for Godot, waiting for the mishap, life.
I am even looking forward to the breakdown (perhaps to experience the infinite joy of things working again).
Through my new works, Jean, we continue to collaborate. You are present even if these paintings don't look like you.
ORDER. CHAOS. CONCRETE. ABSTRACT. COMPOSITION. DECOMPOSITION. ETERNAL RETURN.
These ideas took shape in my mind through intuition.
My first subject was Hindu deity Ganesh, bearer of luck and happiness.
The 'tableaux éclatants' have become my pals, my companions.
A photoelectric cell activates them, so someone walking by is enough to animate them.
If I go down in the middle of the night to eat a banana, I am accompanied by a light show, sound, movements and soft noises.
I have taken down all my older paintings and live only with them."
Niki de Saint Phalle, Letter to Jean Tinguely, 1993
Pulbished on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Gallery Vallois, Paris, in 2023.
Niki de Saint Phalle (Catherine Marie-Agnès de Saint-Phalle, 1930-2002), Franco-American artist, painter, engraver, sculptor and film-maker, famous in particular for her monumental "Nanas", left behind a protean, feminist, exuberant and avant-garde body of work, at the crossroads of Pop Art, New Realism and Neo-Dada, made up of performance-paintings, sculptures and psychoanalytical films.
