Martial Raysse: Dessins/Drawings aantalIn winkelmand 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 sixties are become icons and its allegorical frescoes surprise again, Dilecta Publishing has released a book presenting 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. One hundred 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 products and beach toys crowned by an advertising dummy, ushered into the realm of art «a world that is new, antiseptic and pure», that of the supermarkets and advertising for the consumer society. This reappropriation of objects that are supremely banal aligned him with the experiments of Arman, Spoerri and Tinguely, with whom he founded the New Realists group in 1960. Soon regarded as the young French artist who came closest to American Pop Art, between 1961 in 1966 Raysse participated in numerous artistic events throughout Europe and the United States. After 1968, Raysse underwent a shift which led him to make a sudden break with the circuit of dealers and galleries, and to withdraw to the south of France. Within the community he formed with a number of friends, he made works using craft techniques, and subsequently returned to the most traditional modes of painting. «Martial Raysse», monographic exhibition dedicated to French artist Martial Raysse. Curated by Caroline Bourgeois in collaboration with the artist. From 12 April 2015 to 31 November 2015, Palazzo Grassi, Venice (It.)