New Realistic France, a close friend of the artists of Pop Art in New York and Los Angeles, director of psychedelic films… Raysse is a major artist of  the contemporary scene.

While his portraits of women of the 1960s are become icons and its allegorical frescoes surprise again, this book presents a selection of his drawings, from its beginnings to the present. Still little known, these works on paper are fraught with the same audacity and impertinence that his paintings, eroticism haloed and mythologies updated.

100 selected drawings constitute this publication, showing the practice of drawing, not as one  preparatory step to his paint job, but especially as plastics experiences, very free, allowing him to explore techniques as diverse as mine graphite, pastel or watercolor.

After literary studies, in 1959 Martial Raysse made his first assemblages by enclosing small toys and toiletries in transparent boxes, in order to  foreground, unfussily, the charge of emotion and visual intensity these cold little objects can hold. In 1960, his Visual Hygiene series of household implements hung around a long-handled scrubbing brush, or sunscreen.

English and French text.

Walther Koenig / Les Éditions Dilecta