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b. 1949 | French
R. Ballester
French Painter of Newspaper Collage in the Line of the Nouveaux Réalistes
Rosalie Ballester, born in 1949, is a French painter whose work grows out of printed paper. The daughter of a journalist, she took from her father a fascination with typography, and newspaper pages, torn posters, letters and fragments of old print are the raw material of her canvases, laid in and then half veiled under washes of paint, ruled lines and geometric planes.
Her practice places her in the line of the Nouveaux Réalistes and the affichistes, Jacques Villeglé and Raymond Hains above all, who made art from the torn posters of the Paris streets in the 1950s and 1960s; Ballester herself names Russian abstraction, Malevich and the Constructivists, as the other source of her compositions.
Her paintings combine the two: the accidental texture of printed and layered paper with a deliberate, drawn architecture of planes, discs and letters that float free of their words. In the 1990s she worked with Russian newspapers, whose Cyrillic headlines and small advertisements she cut and pasted as Constructivist slogans.
She exhibits in France and is represented on the French art market; a fuller account of her exhibitions has yet to be published.
