A French term meaning ‘art without form’, this was adopted by the critic MICHEL TAPIE to describe abstract painting (similar to American abstract expressionism) opposed to the rigor of cubism or the geometrical abstraction of de stijl and suprematism, where the artist’s emotions and subconscious fantasies are expressed.
Pioneers of this movement were the German painter WOLS (1913-1951) and French artist HANS HARTUNG (1904-1989), JEAN FAUTRIER (1898-1964) and Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985). After 1954, tachism was introduced as the term to describe all non-geometrical abstraction.
Informalism or Art Informel is a pictorial movement from the 1943–1950s,[1] that includes all the abstract and gestural tendencies that developed in France and the rest of Europe during the World War II, similar to American abstract expressionism started 1946.[2][3] Several distinguishing trends are identified within the movement such as lyrical abstraction, matter painting, New Paris School, tachisme and art brut. The French art critic Michel Tapié coined the term “art autre” (other art) in the homonymous book published in 1952 in relation to non-geometric abstract art.[3]
Pictorial practices
Within this tendency, each artist allows full freedom of expression to the unforeseen quality of materials (a taste for stains or chance) and randomness of gestures, thus rejecting drawing and control and the traditional conception of painting and its development that evolves from the idea to the completed work via sketches and projects. It’s an open work that a spectator can read freely. The pictorial adventure is completely new; instead of going from the meaning to constructing the corresponding signs, the artist begins with the making of signs and gives the corresponding meaning. In the works of Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer, the language of signs is further deconstructed, allowing for a universal interpretation of a private language. The contribution of music produced the art of musical informalism.
Plastic characteristics of this painting are: spontaneity of the gesture, automatism, expressive use of material, the nonexistence of preconceived ideas, the experience that the deed generates the idea, and the work is the place and the privileged moment whereby the artist discovers himself; it is the end of the reproduction of the object for the representation of the theme that becomes the end of the painting, with a sometime calligraphic aspect, referring to a Calligraphic Abstraction in relation to the works of Georges Mathieu, Hans Hartung, or Pierre Soulages.