Georges Badin

About

The garden was large and full of trees, and the white magnolia flowers reached as far as the window. On 13 March 1927, at Céret, he was born.

He wrote first. His texts appeared in Les Cahiers du Sud, in the Mercure de France and in other reviews, and the Mercure published two books, in 1966 and 1968. The page was never for him an inert surface or a settled place: it served, as the free canvas would serve later.

From 1967 to 1986 he was curator of the museum of modern art at Céret.

In 1968 he co-founded the Textruction movement. From 1970 to 1974 he set colour against lines of writing on the canvas, in a struggle Jean-Noël Vuarnet would call “a lettered painting”. An abstract period followed, until 1984, in which the principle of intermittence can already be read: pure colour in patches, set against its own reverse.

Then the limit itself became the subject. Neither figuration nor a refusal of the sign: the limitlessness of subjects.

The books

He worked with writers for forty years. Michel Butor first, and longest — Le Jardin catalan, handwritten poems with original paintings, is the best known of those books. Then Jacqueline Risset, Alain Borer, Robert Marteau, Guy Goffette, Georges-Emmanuel Clancier, Pierre Bergounioux, Patrick Chamoiseau, Lionel Ray, Salah Stétié, Hubert Lucot, Dominique Sampiero, Joël Bastard, Emmanuel Merle, Armand Dupuy. With painters too: Jean Capdeville, Hervé Fischer, Christian Jaccard, Claude Viallat.

Exhibitions

His canvases were shown in Paris from the 1980s onward, notably at the Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, the Galerie Lucie Weill & Seligmann and the Galerie Nicolas Deman; in Liège from 1981 to 1983; at the Galleri Åkern in Norway in 2007; and at the Maison de la Catalanité in Perpignan in 2011.

He died at Céret on 23 November 2014.