The Left-Overs (1981-94)
It might have been thought in the mid-1980’s that Hantaï had fully explored the folding method. Much has been written about the artist's famous silence over the years. In 1998, after fifteen years without exhibiting his work, he presented a new series, the Laissées (Leftovers), dated 1981-94, in the Espace Renn, an ephemeral private exhibition space in Paris, and again one year later, in the exhibition Simon Hantaï: Work from 1960 to 1995 at the art museum in Münster, Germany, to a burst of approving attention from the specialist art press and general circulation newspapers. The story behind these Laissées paintings is surely unique in the history of art.
At the end of the Tabulas series, Hantaï had made a group of enormous, out-size paintings for an exhibition at the CAPC museum in Bordeaux. The space resembles what might best be described as an industrial cathedral and the installation photographs of the event show viewers dwarfed by the enormous canvases surrounding them. With hindsight, however, the artist decided that he would keep only a small selection of these paintings and destroy the rest. In the summer of 1994 he began to cut up these paintings in order to dispose of them. Their forms had been conceived on a vast scale and were now being collapsed to that of the human body. The artist discovered that certain forms, when detached from their original compositions, began to function in an independent manner and he decided that they constituted a series of new paintings in their own right
The Laissées series represents an extraordinary shift in the artist’s work. Absent is the research into light and color of the Tabulas. These are somber paintings that, to the contrary, seem to suck in and pulverize light, letting nothing escape from a decentralized void. These paintings constitute a distinct and authentic ‘late phase’ in the artist’s work. The Laissées observe us from a point of suspension in a time warp. They seem to contain a truth that the artist has decided not to tell. Or maybe they are the portrait of an artist who has shown us much and now invites us to think for ourselves.