Alain Satié, Entassements I, 1964, 1989, 1999, Silkscreen and paint on cloth, 200 × 155 cm, Edition of 10 plus III AP
Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin
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Series of two editions silkscreened on cloth. The later published edition includes hand-painted additions.
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Alain Satié was a French artist who, as a core figure of the Lettrist movement since 1964, worked with a wide range of materials. After his technical studies, he enrolled in the Toulouse School of Fine Arts. He then settled in Paris, where he came into contact with the unfolding of the experiments of Raymond Queneau’s Potential Literature and the Lettrism of Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, Jacques Spacagna, and Roland Sabatier, Satié’s older brother. Satié’s work includes poetry, hypergraphic novels, painting, film, sculpture, and furniture design. His poems are characterized by elaborate sequences, incorporating violent and harsh sounds such as whistles, shouts, or repeated blows. His paintings are distinguished by the use of hypergraphy in rhythmic, yet gestural compositions formed of superimpositions, transparencies, reliefs, and shadows. Between 1964 and 1967, Satie exhibited his Entassements, a series of thirty paintings composed of a profusion of black signs and letters on a white background, arranged according to a specific configuration. The series was reissued as a multiple for Edizioni Conz, produced between 1989 and 1999. Satié also produced a unique portrait of Conz (Untitled, 2007), part of the series of hypergraphic portraits comprised of agglomerates of invented characters, collages, and reliefs. Satié was one of the first Lettrists to extend and sculpturally transform architecture and furniture design. He created elaborate designs and models for new cities, commercial and residential complexes, chairs, and lamps. A catalogue devoted entirely to Satié’s work, titled Alain Satié. Autour et détours du portrait, was published by Archivio Conz in 2009. Throughout his career, Satié took part in numerous group exhibitions dedicated to Lettrism at, among others, the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1965), the Musée de Luxembourg, and the Musée de l’objet in Blois. His works are included in the collections of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Pinacoteca in Venice, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
