Patrick Saytour (b. 1935, Nice – d. 2023, Aubais) is a founding member of Supports/Surfaces, a group that has latterly been referred to as the “last French avant-garde”. Somewhat overlooked at the time, Supports/Surfaces is today understood within the context of the turbulent times around 1968 which left a lasting mark on French society. At a time, when the traditional medium of painting was placed under scrutiny, members of the Supports/Surfaces group overturned its codes and sought to invent new ones, opening the way for innovation and experimentation. Focusing their attention on the materiality of painting, they quite literally deconstructed its traditional forms, eluding representation to focus on its most basic material constituents, namely the canvas or the frame. Modes of production and presentation are revisited, broadening the notion of the painter’s gesture to folding, cutting and assembling works. Active both in the field of painting and theory, they were close to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, while aesthetically, their works were influenced by the thought of Karl Marx and the work of Sigmund Freud, as well as the social sciences.

Saytour’s works entitled Tension belong to a series of a dozen so-called “dépositions” (depositions), made especially for the outdoor presentation Intérieur-Extérieur, held between June to August 1970, just a few months before the official creation of the group Supports/Surfaces in Paris. This nomadic, aleatory displays of brief duration presented works by the future members of the group in twelve outdoor locations in southern France between the Alps and the Pyrenees outside the usual art context. Made out of painted wooden strips held together by rope, Saytour’s works are mobile and easy to dismantle. While the triangular and square shapes are intended to be hung like a painting, the others are made to be leant against the wall. For Patrick Saytour, the plein-air installations were pioneering experiments in how artworks interact with natural or social sites, and how the environment conditions the works and the viewer’s experience of it.