Raysse Peinture à haute tension

STURTEVANT executed Raysse Peinture à haute tension (1969) only four years after Martial Raysse’s original, which began to incorporate neon into the designs. This piece, with its interlocking allusions and repetitions, spotlights the reflexivity of art and its practices where the question of the portrait is addressed in an eminently playful way, from reference to reference, from citation to citation. It is also interesting to remember that, at a time when Roland Barthes observed the death of the author and the birth of the reader in 1968, STURTEVANT asserts the position of the viewer.

This work was first presented by the Pinault Collection in the exhibition « Forever Sixties » at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes (2023).