Le Lavaux et la Tour de Marsens, 1966

Léo Andenmatten  

Painter born on February 25, 1922 in La Souste, and died on September 24, 1979 in Sion.

Artist of painting, mosaic, stained glass, glass painting, drawing, acrylic painting, building decoration and oil painting.

Commercial employee in Lausanne where he emigrated in 1940, Andenmatten painted as an autodidact and first exhibited with “Sunday painters”. The advice of Jaques Berger then of Georges Aubert, the support of the art critic André Kuenzi and that of the Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts of Valais marked the first stages of a series of distinctions that marked his career during the 1950s: first personal exhibitions in Lausanne and Sion in 1953, admission to the Society of Swiss Painters, Sculptors and Architects (SPSAS) in 1954, Federal Fine Arts Exchange in 1955 and 1958, first exhibition in German-speaking Switzerland in Basel in 1956, Bourse Alice Bailly in 1957.

A third federal grant obtained in 1959 commits him to return to Valais and devote himself entirely to painting. With his wife, he opened the same year in Sion the first private and permanent art gallery in the canton, the Carrefour des arts. For ten years, he determined its temperate modernist line and thus secured a central position on the Valais artistic scene. The founding and presidency of the cantonal section of the SPSAS in 1972, followed by a monograph and a retrospective of his work at the Manoir de Martigny in 1977 marked the peak of his recognition among the public and among artists from Valais. The Cantonal Museum of Fine Arts in Sion devoted a critical retrospective to him in 1989.

His first self-taught works betray a “modern” interest for surface and color, more than for space and depth. From the beginning of the 1950s, his compositions, while remaining figurative, became geometrized and resorted to an almost pure color. His iconographic repertoire is fixed definitively in still life and especially in the landscape, a genre fueled by several trips.

Like many artists, however, he suffered the impact of the exhibition Abstract painting in Switzerland presented in Neuchâtel in 1957. He then experienced a short non-figurative period. The return to Valais brought it to an abrupt end; he then seeks a middle way revealed to him by the southern light during a stay in Spain in 1963. In his compositions now simplified, sometimes reduced to a horizon line, he resorts to very clear tones that he subtly modulates by laminating thin films of acrylic paint.

The last ten years of its production are marked by an almost monochrome. The apparent immateriality of the pictorial surface and the search for a luministic space recall the works of Mark Rothko, which he discovered during a trip to the United States in 1969. The snowy landscape then becomes his favored motif. Tending towards abstraction, Andenmatten draws from it compositions that maintain the fundamental dialectic of all his painted work, between figuration and non-figuration, between tradition and modernity.