At first glance, Pierre Célice’s paintings seem to have been made in a single movement: fields of colour, lines, grids and signs moving freely across the canvas. Look for longer, and you see how carefully they are built up. Célice began as a figurative painter and, from the late 1970s, developed a visual language of his own, made of colour, line, rhythm and sign. His work sits between painting, drawing, collage, writing and architecture, and so fits no single movement entirely.
A painter who burned his own work
Célice was born in Paris in 1932, the son of a lawyer. He began studying law but soon chose drawing and painting instead. He later described the Polish-French painter Henri Hayden as his master. From the 1950s he exhibited in Paris, at Galerie Jacob in 1953 and later at Galerie Simone Badinier. In 1962 he was awarded the Prix Victor Chocquet.
His early work was figurative but was pared down further and further to planes and lines, while colour took on a more independent role. In the early 1970s he worked in the lithography studio of Peter Bramsen, where he saw the work of, among others, Bram van Velde, Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn and Karel Appel. During those years he gave up figuration for good, though not without doubt. He was so dissatisfied with what he was making that for several years he destroyed and burned paintings. Only towards the end of the 1970s did he find a visual language in which he recognised himself. The paintings for which he is now known are therefore the result of a long and self-critical search.
An alphabet that refuses to be read
His mature work draws on a fixed repertoire of lines, arcs, grids, ladders, crosses, loops, blocks and pictogram-like signs. Some resemble letters, others plans, machines or buildings. Célice himself spoke of structures, signs and pictograms. The eye looks for meaning but does not find it: the paintings seem legible without being so, like an unknown alphabet. He does not depict a scene. He builds an image out of signs.
Spontaneous, yet constructed
What looks like a single free gesture is usually built up methodically. Célice first explored compositions and colour relationships in small sketchbooks. He painted separate sheets of paper, cut shapes from them (sometimes with pinking shears), moved and layered them, and only then incorporated them into the finished work. The critic Catherine Millet pointed to the same tension: beneath the apparent spontaneity lies a refined composition. This sets him apart from Jackson Pollock, whom he admired. With Pollock, the gesture helps to determine the composition; with Célice, the composition directs the gesture.
Where does he sit in art history?
Célice encountered artists from the CoBrA circle but was not a CoBrA artist himself. Where CoBrA stands for direct expression and automatism, he remained committed to order, repetition and structure. With Bram van Velde he shares the tension between free form and constructed image; with Alechinsky, a line that moves between drawing and writing.
Towards the end of the 1970s, pattern plays a larger part in his work. These paintings run parallel to Pattern and Decoration, the movement that, in those same years, took ornament, repetition and colour seriously again in the United States. Célice was not part of it, but he was asking similar questions. Millet later pointed to the comparison with Robert Zakanitch, one of the movement’s leading figures. In 2019 this side of his work was the focus of the exhibition Pierre Célice, Peinture Pattern.
There is also a formal kinship with the papiers découpés of Henri Matisse. Seen from today, his pictograms may also recall Jean-Michel Basquiat or Keith Haring, in whose work image and sign likewise merge. There is no question of influence; it is a reading made in hindsight.
A visual world beyond Europe
Célice looked beyond European postwar painting. In conversations about his work he referred to Ndebele art, Batcham masks from Cameroon, the Nazca lines in Peru and the architecture of Yemen. His motifs lie between ornament, writing, architecture and abstract form, and belong to no single tradition. That is precisely why they remain open to more than one reading.
Painting that takes up architecture
From the 1970s Célice also made monumental sculptures, murals, façade works, neon, glass and ceramics. Examples include sculptures for the Centre Saint-Lazare in Paris (1975), a neon work for Antenne 2 (1981), ten screen-printed glass panels for the Maison de l’Avocat (1996) and a ceramic mural for the Collège Saint-Exupéry in Alençon (1997). His visual language works at every scale, from sketchbook to building.
In 2010 the Musée d’Art, d’Histoire et d’Archéologie in Évreux gave him carte blanche for the exhibition Du sol au plafond (‘From Floor to Ceiling’). Célice treated the museum itself as his support: his signs and fields of colour responded to the walls, ceilings and architectural features.
Looking at Célice
A Célice painting often starts with something familiar: a letter, a grid, a ladder, a floor plan. Just as the image seems about to become recognisable, it slips away again. That is what makes it worth looking at for longer.
