Gérard Deschamps

The work

One night
1987
59.6 x 49.6 x 10.2 cm
Textile on canvas

Presented inside a box closed at the front with transparent methacrylate, One night is separated from the viewer’s space and automatically takes on attributes different from those exhibited openly and framed.
While Pavlos, of whom the Foundation owns a splendid work, turns his boxes into a display worthy of a shop window, Deschamps gives his work the form of a case that brings together and preserves the memory of something personal and intimate.
Deschamps gives his work the form of a case that brings together and preserves the memory of something personal and intimate.
One night, a work from 1987, is the evocative title of the memory of a night through the accumulation and disorder—only apparent—of women’s and men’s underwear. Intimacy bordering on fetishism is mixed with a certain touch of libertine and exhibitionist humor.

The work is vividly defined by its pop chromaticism. The predominance of electric blue, touches of acid colors, red verging on pastel pink, and yellow bring together the triad of basic, elemental colors, perhaps as basic as the desire and instinct of the situation evoked.

The artist

Since 1957, Deschamps, who like other artists in the exhibition was close to the Nouveaux Réalistes, has created accumulations of all kinds of objects, often in bright colors, gathered in disorder and enclosed in methacrylate boxes, accentuating the contradiction between privacy and publicity.