ARMAN (1928-2005) - Lot 6

ARMAN (1928-2005) Naked, 2002 Serigraph, numbered and signed. Paper : Velin d'Arches 250 g Format : 270 x 380 mm Justified 56/ 120 Note: An emblematic figure of the Nouveau Réalisme movement, from the 1960s onwards Arman developed a body of work based on the appropriation, repetition and fragmentation of the signs of modernity. Although Arman is best known for his accumulation and destruction of objects, his graphic work reveals an equally incisive reflection on the body, language and the sign. With Naked (2002), the artist proposes a conceptual approach to the nude, reduced here to a stylized hand, isolated on a deep black background. The radical contrast between the white of the form, the red tracings evoking an organic cartography, and the typographic inscriptions repeating the word "nude", transforms the body into a surface of symbolic projection. The nude is no longer a classical figurative figure, but a semantic territory, at once anatomical, linguistic and graphic. The silkscreen plays on the superimposition of registers: drawing, writing, sign and color. The word "nue", repeated like a motif, acts as a verbal accumulation, a direct transposition of Arman's fundamental principles into the field of printmaking. The bright, almost surgical red introduces a tension between abstraction and corporeality, between idea and flesh.