André Marfaing

André Marfaing (1925-87) was a French non-figurative painter and printmaker associated with abstract art and informalism. This catalogue raisonné is a complete repertory of his painted work, from his initial "youth" paintings (1948-52) until his last works completed in 1986. The year 1952, when he took up non-figuration, was a fundamental step that led him very quickly to abstraction.

His first forays into painting, his earlier figurative canvases, still lifes, landscapes, and even his few portraits, live on as witnesses to his apprenticeship and as pointers to an artistic adventure that remained latent. The use of acrylic, which gained ground in 1970, led to formal inflections that reached into the heart of his painting.

Marfaing probes what is deepest in others as well as his own private space, the confines of a nature within, a cosmos without landscape, a terrain whose contours and features he ceased depicting long ago. The present catalogue raisonné retraces such a path step by step, following up the clues and noting the silences, without ever dissipating the mystery that Marfaing knew how to fathom and to sustain. One must follow these traces as he himself proceeded—with humility, to come to him in the same way his painting calls us. His works, his writings, his friendships, his struggles form an intertwined and inextricable whole.