Claude Viallat - Bulls (English Edition)

The book presents reproductions of bullfighting works from 1956 to 2020, with a preface by Aymeric Mantoux, an interview between Claude Viallat and Michel Nuridsany, and a text by Matthieu Léglise. A biography, bibliography and list of exhibitions.

"For a long time, I believed that Claude Viallat was the official painter of bullfighting. I saw him at the time of the ferias in Arles or Nîmes, as we could recognize his photographer friend Lucien Clergue or the writer Alain Montcouquiol. I heard people greet him and call him "master." How not to be impressed by the posters he was making for Sevilla or some other large plaza de toros. Unlike many of my contemporaries, I knew little about his powerful abstract work at the time. Viallat, for me, was the one who, like Picasso de Toros y Toreros, knew how to draw bulls, how to capture the instant, the light, the musicality of a race under his pencil or brush strokes. Claude Viallat, in short, was like Picasso in his day. It's not false. But Viallat is above all ... Viallat! That of forms, Supports / Surfaces, large tarpaulins, military or civilian, covered with large colored plates as a metonymy of the artist's cosmogony. Since the end of 1950s and the start of his long career as a painter, Claude Viallat is known by his sponges, shapes cut from old cardboard calendars, and his talent as a colourist. His works without frame are hung on the picture rails of the largest museums. " Aymeric Mantoux