Regarding the term Antisculptures, Dewasne explains:

“It wasn’t “anti”, it was out of honesty. Here is the principle behind Antisculpture: I started with the plastic vocabulary developed on the plane, then I asked myself why I always did this on flat planes, why not on planes that evolve in space while preserving the two dimensions of painting.

 

I found ready-made forms in industry that served as supports for me, and I painted on them as if they were canvases. I am a painter, not a sculptor.”

With his Antisculptures, Dewasne developed a formal vocabulary (straight lines and curves) and reversed the three primary colours in the field of optics, unifying his artistic research and fundamental to his palette: red, green and blue, with yellow shining through by oscillation. White and black provide harmonies and dissonances within a structuring system that will become increasingly radical.

In 1951, he created his first Antisculpture, Le Tombeau de Webern (Centre Pompidou), which he painted on the wreck of a racing car bought in a scrapyard in Suresnes for 3,000 francs. For him, this wreck became a symbol of modernity.

This tribute to the great Viennese twelve-tone composer Anton Webern recalls his passion for music (he was a regular at Pierre Boulez’s Domaine Musical) and demonstrates the symbiosis of his plastic and expressive research with mathematics, architecture, and atonality in music.

Colourful Antisculptures at the Centre Pompidou

In 1970, Dewasne, having seen the model of the future Centre Pompidou, invited its architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers to visit his studio, where the pipes were painted and his antisculptures were housed. The effect was striking. Convinced of the effectiveness of colour, they abandoned the grey colour initially planned for the Centre. The model was adopted. The evidence was clear: ‘the Centre Pompidou will be colourful’.

The highlight of his work on Antisculptures, Habitacle rouge 1972 (Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Matisse Museum). On the advice of Jean-Claude Lahumière, Dewasne imagined a round structure that echoes the shape of the infinity symbol ∞.

This penetrable aluminium tube structure is the receptacle for a circular fresco that ‘draws us into a whirlwind of highly geometric plastic magic’. The red enamel motifs follow the concave and convex volumes and curves and are reflected in the black lacquered ceiling.

This monumental work has been exhibited in numerous museums until its final public presentation for the inauguration of the new wing of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.

The transition from painting to volume triggers a desire for monumentality that Dewasne has aspired to since his early days.

The commissions led to gigantism.

In 1979, Dewasne was invited by the director of a chemical factory, Gori Vaerk, in Koldong, Denmark, to paint an Antisculpture in situ. It consisted of twenty cubic tanks with concentric patterns arranged in three rows of vats and 7 km of pipes running through the factory.

Dewasne created another monumental Antisculpture in Zeevenaar (Netherlands) for the Stuyvesant tobacco factory, which became an Hommage à Spinoza in a 7-metre-high machine room.