Robert Mangold conceives of painting essentially as an expanse of monochrome colour on a surface. For him, a painting is therefore first and foremost a pictorial surface, whose primary quality is flatness, as he himself states in his studio notes. The artist seeks to establish a balance between the three concepts that form the basis of his work: the surface, the drawn line and the outline of the canvas (shaped canvas).

For this exhibition, ‘Curled Figures Paintings (2000-2002)’, Mangold uses only one very fluid colour applied with a roller, which produces luminous effects reminiscent of the use of pastels in studies on paper. The preferred format is a long rectangle, composed of one or more canvases juxtaposed horizontally at a low height.

The idea of stability in relation to the ground is accentuated by an effect of unfolding in space. Since the series Attic (1991), in which the surface was covered with an arabesque (looping arabesque), the work has made direct references to art history. The title Attic referred to the famous collection of Greek vases at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which the artist admired. It was the first time that a series of works had made reference to the field of art.

The latest works exhibited in Brussels continue in this direction and help us to understand the relationship between abstract art and the grammar of ornamentation. A loop and a counter-loop evolve on the painted surfaces. Here, Mangold develops a vocabulary specific to the history of art belonging to various civilisations. The beauty lies in this universal decorative background, allowing us to summarise his work in five words: flatness, decontextualisation, purification, modularisation, geometrisation.The pleasure that the viewer can find is this apparent bliss. We could simply say that Robert Mangold follows his own path, which seems to be increasingly self-evident and has gained in lightness by going to the essential.